The Children's Block

by Otto Kraus

  To my wife, Dita, without whom this book wouldn’t have been written.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The events described here really happened. The book is based on research, my personal experience and on interviews with surviving instructors of the Children’s Block in the Czech Family Camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  The characters – except for Fredy Hirsch, Jakob and Miriam Edelstein and their son Aryeh, Slavek Lederer, Dr Mengele, Eichmann and the SS guards – are composites of several people and shouldn’t be identified with any particular person.

  Otto B Kraus

  How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob:

  And thy tabernacles, O Israel (Numbers 24:5)

  INTRODUCTION

  WHEN WWII WAS OVER, SURVIVORS began returning from the Nazi concentration camps. But people who had stayed in their homes during the war were unable or unwilling to listen when the prisoners described what they had been through. They said that to listen to these horrors was too painful and would give them nightmares, or else they dismissed our descriptions as wildly exaggerated.

  We therefore ceased to speak about our experiences, except when we were among fellow survivors.

  On one such occasion Harry T who, like my husband Otto, had been a counsellor on the Children’s Block, turned to Otto, and said:

  ‘Don’t you think, Otto, that the time has come to write about the Children’s Block in Auschwitz-Birkenau? There was nothing like it in the entire Nazi machinery of the extermination of the Jews. A few of us are still alive, but after we are gone, there won’t be anyone left to tell the story. You’re a writer, you should do it.’

  Otto started making notes of the events he remembered and I too supplied my own. Later he began visiting former co-workers from the Children’s Block, who were scattered in the kibbutzim and towns all over Israel. It took him years to collect the material because Otto worked as a school teacher and was free only at weekends. We had no car and he was obliged to travel by public transport which, as is known, keeps the Shabbat. People didn’t have phones yet and visits had to be arranged by letter.

  In the course of these encounters with his former fellow counsellors and teachers, Otto discovered a surprising fact. Comparing the mortality rate among the prisoners, he found that a much larger percentage of those who had worked with the children remained alive, than of the other prisoners.

  The reason couldn’t be that they had received more food. They hadn’t. Even on the Children’s Block the adults had eaten the same soup as the rest of the prisoners. Children had been given a more nourishing soup, but the Block Senior, Fredy Hirsch, had forbidden the staff to take even a spoonful of the children’s soup.

  Otto came to the conclusion that it was their mission that had given strength and stamina to the counsellors. They’d had a goal which helped them overcome the dread of their looming death and their pity for losing their young lives. They dedicated themselves to alleviating the suffering of the children. This is in accord with the philosophy of Victor Frankl.

  Planning the structure of the novel was a slow process. Otto didn’t want it to be just another document about the tragedy of the holocaust. Many such books already existed. I often saw him sitting at his desk staring into space. He explained: ‘Don’t think I am idle, I am thinking.’ He created the characters in the book from people he knew. But he changed their identity in such a way that they couldn’t recognise themselves. For example Lisa Pomnenka is a composite of two young women who decorated the wall in the Children’s Block. Scenes I myself witnessed or events which actually happened to me, Otto attached to other characters. Also the hero of the novel, Alex Ehren, is fictional, although Otto mixed into his personality some of his own biographical elements. And of course, no such secret diary existed in reality.

  Finally Otto was ready to start writing. After school he would sit at his desk, or under the tree on our porch and write. There were moments when he had to stop, overcome by emotion. On one occasion I found him with his head resting against his crossed arms on the desk, sobbing. He had just written the poem, ‘Green’.

  One line of the poem became the title of the Czech edition of the book: Smoke is my brother.

  When Otto’s lifelong friend Pavel Stránský came from Prague to visit us in Israel, he offered to translate Otto’s novel to Czech. The first Czech edition of the book was published in Prague in 1993. In 1995 it came out in English but was distributed only in Israel, where there is only a limited English readership. In later years the book was also translated into French (2013) and Hebrew (2014).

  Now the book is available worldwide thanks to Penguin Random House. Otto would be glad to hear about it, but he is no longer with us. I’m going to whisper the happy news to his grave. Perhaps it will be delivered to him.

  Dita Kraus

  PROLOGUE

  THIS BOOK IS A STORY based on Alex Ehren’s diaries. I had to edit the script, which would have been obscure to readers unfamiliar with the Czech Family Camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. I filled in the gaps where pages were missing, either lost or simply not copied in the hasty specimen I received from Antonin Dominicus. I kept the narrative close to the original, though I have changed the names of people; many of them are dead but those who are still alive might feel embarrassed by events mentioned in the diary.

  As I leaf through the pages I see in my mind the cache we dug under our bunk. We took turns scooping out the dirt with our mess bowls and then we strewed it on the camp road where it melted with the mud. We worked with our spoons but were careful not to break their handles because, had I lost my spoon, I would have had to lap my soup like a dog. We covered the hole with a plank, which Shashek pried loose from behind his cot, where it was dark even at noon. Had somebody reported the missing board, the Block Senior would have sentenced us to twenty lashes of the cane. We saved some of the dirt and spread it over the plank to make it look like the pressed earth of the floor and we opened our cache only at night to conceal in it the pages Alex Ehren had written during the day. By the end of June, which was the time scheduled for our execution, we had one hundred and twenty-three diary sheets written in Alex’s small handwriting, in which the end strokes curled upwards like piglets’ tails and the letter ‘g’ looked like the figure eight.

  We lived on a bunk built for four, but in times of over-crowding – namely before the departure of the September transport and after the arrival of the May contingent – it slept seven and, at times, even eight. There was so little space on the berth that when one of us wanted to ease his hip, we all had to turn in a tangle of legs and chests and hollow bellies as if we were one many-limbed creature, a Hindu god or a centipede. We grew intimate, not only in body but also in mind, because we knew that although we were not born from one womb, we would certainly die together.

  We decided to write a diary to establish a link with the world. We were like a stone cast into the void of the universe, out of time, damned, forsaken and utterly alone. We believed that by leaving a written record we wouldn’t vanish from human memory, like a word torn away by the wind or a letter written on running water. We knew that there was little chance that anybody would ever read the diary. The pages might fall into the hands of the Block Senior, who would burn them to ashes. Yet even if the folder survived it might never be found after we were marched to the gas chambers. Still, our enterprise brightened our nights and bolstered our spirits during our smoke-filled days. We chose Alex Ehren to write the records because he had access to a pencil and paper. He also had a table and the privacy of the stall when the children met their parents before the evening roll call. Besides, Alex Ehren was a poet and had a way with words. I still remember crumbs of his verses, although after so many years I have probably changed some lines or lost the fall
of his rhythm or confused his phrases with some other poems I read later. His verses may sound trivial today but we were silently impressed when he whispered the words into the murkiness of our bunk.

  Alex Ehren was a poet but the records were not entirely his. We shared not only the narrow space of our berth but also our thoughts and fears, which Alex moulded into round sentences and paragraphs. We were all actors in a play and, though we were not on stage, our voices did play a part. I do not know if there were lines Alex kept for himself, thoughts and events he was too shy to share.

  We wrapped the diary in tar paper torn from the roof and in an oilskin sleeve, which we had bartered for a bread ration with a Russian prisoner of war. The oilskin must have belonged to a Baltic fisherman because it smelled of mermaids and fish and decaying algae. When we touched it we closed our eyes and dreamt about the freedom of the ocean, the ships that sailed to exotic places, islands fragrant with spices and coastlines sweet with lemon blossom. Each time we buried the parcel, its scent lingered on my fingers and reminded me that, although I would dissolve into a wisp of smoke, the records would prevail and bear witness that we had lived.

  After the war I was too busy to travel to Auschwitz-Birkenau and excavate memories I had tried to forget. I was recuperating from a bout of typhoid fever contracted in a Soviet quarantine camp and when I finally returned to Prague I was eager to build a world for myself to replace the one I had lost. I had no family, no home, no friends and Alex Ehren’s diaries seemed of little importance.

  I basked in my new freedom and walked the streets, watched the flow of the river under the Charles Bridge and climbed the steps of Petřín Hill. It was exhilarating to be alive and able to roam wherever I chose. Lilacs were blooming in the parks and I sat in their scented dusk, watching the gait of young women and aching at the sway of their breasts. For the first time in five years I wasn’t considered subhuman, a monster or vermin that was to be exterminated. After months of abysmal starvation I had enough bread to fill my stomach and, as people didn’t shrink from me as if I were a leper, I was learning to feel human again. Indeed I’d refused to return to Auschwitz to look for the diary. I didn’t want to descend into the abyss of sorrow and to reopen my wounds, which had barely begun to heal. I didn’t want to burrow into the silt of Birkenau, which contained the ashes of my father, my friends and the bones of the girls whose elbows I had touched in the intimacy of a movie theatre in my green pre-war years. Yet, above all, I wanted to forget the narrow faces of the children with whom I had worked during my last months in Birkenau.

  All that kept me from trying to recover Alex Ehren’s diaries. There is a myth that man cannot survive a face-to-face encounter with God. Yet if a man exposed to pure light will die, will he not lose his soul after he has experienced ultimate evil? There were times when I witnessed events so unnatural that, had I not grown a shield of unfeeling around my heart, I would have perished in terror or lapsed into insanity or, if I did survive, remain crippled for life. It wasn’t a flood that only came and went; it wasn’t a sudden stroke of disaster, a death of a beloved person, but a continuous exposure to death, where one horrific morning was followed by worse fears at night. I had nightmares but when I awoke on my straw mattress, my dreams paled against the horrors of reality. The longer I was exposed to fear and helplessness the thicker the shield of ice grew until there was barely any heart left under the glacier of unfeeling.

  Over the course of the years the shield of ice has grown thinner, though it has never melted entirely. I know when it is time to laugh and when to weep, but my tears and my laughter are only a mask. For I am a man set apart from the rest of humanity, only partly able to love, to hate and to feel.

  * * *

  There are no accidents in our lives, because events are an outcome of all that has ever occurred, and whatever befalls us had to happen and couldn’t have been avoided. I’d refused to recover Alex Ehren’s diaries because I was reluctant to deal with my past. The human mind stores pain in its cellars and I didn’t want even to have the keys to rooms I had locked and forgotten. And yet the records caught up with me in a way and in a place where I least expected them.

  It was at the end of summer, twenty-three years after I had left Auschwitz, when I met the Czech publicist Antonin Dominicus. He was, like so many of his compatriots, an incurable romantic with a penchant for good food, comfort and financial security, which made him a pleasant companion but a poor martyr. He had fled Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion in 1968 and had come to settle in Jerusalem with the intention to write about freedom, truth and goodwill among the people of the earth. I met him for the second time before he left for Canada to become the editor of a Czech periodical in Toronto.

  We were sitting in a Greek restaurant near the Jaffa Gate and spoke about the Jewish persecution complex. He killed his cigarette with his delicate fingers and ran his hand through his hair.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘I do understand. I’ve visited Auschwitz.’ He felt guilty because he had spent the war in the safety of his home while I had been shipped off to the camps. He leant over the table and contemplated his cup of coffee.

  ‘Most of the Birkenau barracks are gone,’ he recalled, ‘burned by the Russians or dismantled. I left my tourist group and roamed. The wind made the grass ripple like water and the chimneys stood out like fingers of a buried hand. A surrealistic experience, as if I were in a Salvador Dali landscape. Or a Hieronymus Bosch,’ he added and looked away.

  ‘There is a memorial, of course, but no Jews are named. The Bolsheviks are terribly conservative, stick to Marx and Lenin and all that. Jews have no nation, you know. They read their Lenin like the Gospel, or the Ten Commandments, if you wish. Take your pick.’ He paused in his monologue.

  ‘Of course there are documents. Thousands of them. There is a museum in Auschwitz with an exhibition and even pictures that some inmates had scribbled on the walls. Most of the papers are locked up in Warsaw and not available to the public. But they told me that I could use them for research. Mind you, I was on an official mission then. An artist. A member of the Writers Union, a cadre communist, “one of us”,’ he added with a self-deprecating movement of his hand.

  ‘There was a Czech diary or something.’ He touched his short beard. He paused and contemplated me queasily. ‘Could have been from your time.’

  ‘It should be here in Jerusalem,’ I said.

  ‘Possibly. But the Poles won’t let it out. Certainly not after the Dubcek spring in Prague. A Zionist plot and all that rot.’

  ‘Did you read the diary? Whose was it?’

  ‘No, I haven’t read it. How could I? Just opened a page here and there. There was no time between the addresses and toasting the brotherhood of the Czechs and the Poles. No more fascism, no more war. With the Soviet Union for ever and ever. Brotherhood, my foot. One could be choked by too much love. Friendship grown out of the barrels of guns.’ He laughed bitterly and his voice was full of resentment. He lit yet another cigarette though his saucer was already brim-full with stubs.

  ‘The diary,’ I said, ‘was it written in pen, in pencil? How many pages?’

  ‘It was a long time ago and I had only a glimpse at it. It was pencil, I think.’

  His answers were tentative but after a while I had no doubt that what he had seen was Alex Ehren’s diary. I was greatly excited but, at the same time, in a strange, perverse manner, also glad that the pages would remain unread until they fell apart, destroyed by mould. I had a safe job, a family to support and no wish to struggle with the ghosts of yesteryear.

  * * *

  For several days afterwards I was uncomfortable, as if I had left a task unfinished. But then my conscience would fall asleep and I kept to my routine, got up to work, ate my meals and twice weekly made love to my wife. I was sure that I would never again meet Antonin Dominicus and soon forgot the whole matter.

  But one day he was back.

  ‘Like a bad penny,’ he said on the phone. ‘I won’t stay long
, two, three weeks perhaps. I was commissioned to write a story about a Czech medieval knight. I came to see the Crusader Halls in Acre. Imagine a Czech crusader in Acre. A compatriot in the Holy Land. Just like you.’

  Dominicus sounded enthusiastic, friendly, Czech and familiar with the accents of my childhood.

  ‘Still interested in the Auschwitz manuscript?’ he said.

  ‘You said there was no way to get access to it?’

  ‘Why don’t you come and have a beer with a countryman?’ He was staying in one of the elegant Haifa hotels and his shirt and shoes were new and expensive. We sat on the terrace and he looked out at the hazy shores of Acre.

  ‘What clever people you Jews are. Make the desert bloom, build kibbutzim and blow up Russian tanks. But you’ve never learned how to brew decent beer. No kick.’ He grimaced but poured himself another glass. ‘There is a man who could produce a photocopy. Still,’ he cautioned, ‘you might pay and get nothing. Nobody to complain to, understand? The Pole may be a cheat, or chicken out at the last moment. It’s like shooting in the dark, but it’s better than not shooting at all,’ and he sighed again over the poor quality of the Israeli beer.

  * * *

  After a year I wrote off the two hundred black-market dollars I’d given him, which I hadn’t told my wife about. There were other things I’d lost and I felt relieved that I wouldn’t have to go back to my past. It was a surprise when I received a manila envelope with a note from Dominicus and inside a photocopy of Alex Ehren’s manuscript.

  Even looking at the copy I could tell that the original seemed to have been well preserved although a few pages were missing and it seemed as if others had been slightly damaged, as if an insect or an animal, possibly a mouse, had nibbled at their edges. I never learned how the diary parcel was found. The manuscript was still legible in spite of the long time it had lain in the damp hole under our bunks. The night after Dr Mengele’s selection we had wrapped the sheets for the last time in the tar paper and the oilskin sleeve, which smelled of mermaids and fish and freedom.