The Children's Block

by Otto Kraus

  A bench was set up and the culprits were stripped and spread-eagled over the planks. The man was tall and well built, and, because he worked in the potato-peeling commando, his body was vigorous and strong. Alex Ehren watched the young woman whose copper hair had kept its sheen despite the squalor of the camp. Her face was contorted with fear and yet the head with its red mane was wild like that of Medusa. The Block Senior cut the air with his cane, which produced a sharp and menacing sound.

  ‘Thirty lashes,’ said the Priest, and Alex Ehren watched the woman’s body quiver at each blow. There was life and passion under her luminous skin and as she tried to lift herself from the bench he saw her lovely breasts, smooth and shaped to perfection. The cane broke the delicate blue veins and her blood ran in tiny brooks into the parting of her back. Alex Ehren was ashamed that his pity was spiced with desire but he didn’t look away from the naked body, from the red hair and the wounds that opened like lips.

  The lovers were carried to the Hospital Block, but even in her swoon the girl was exquisitely beautiful. The man died several days later of infection but the girl recovered and returned to her bunk, limping, pale and with her head shaven clean. The women at her bunk gave up part of their bread and nursed her back to strength.

  ‘We have two lives,’ said Marta Felix, who was the oldest of the teachers on the Children’s Block, ‘one dressed and the other one naked. We try to keep them apart but sometimes they intertwine and meet.’

  It was a terrible thing that the children watched the flogging and Himmelblau felt guilty that he didn’t refuse to let them attend. He braced himself to face the SS soldier, the Priest, but he was scared that he too would be caned. He feared the bench and the blood and did nothing.

  In the evening he locked himself in his cubicle and lit a cigarette. The matter was all over the camp, he mused, and even if the children hadn’t seen the flogging and the naked bodies, they would have heard about them anyway. It was always the same, Himmelblau thought unhappily; he was full of good intentions but at the end he bowed to the inevitable, his common sense or his fear. He blamed himself for his weakness and thought about Fredy, who had failed in his moment of truth. He drew smoke into his lungs and consoled himself that he was like the grass that bends in the wind but survives the storm. One day, he assured himself, the war would come to an end and if he dodged, bowed and complied, some of the children might survive. He fingered the whistle on a string and thought about the uprising. He wasn’t a brave man but neither was he a fool and he knew that unless there was a miracle, they would all die.

  For several days Alex Ehren felt ashamed and wouldn’t touch Lisa Pomnenka’s hand, as if he had committed adultery with the copper-haired woman. Sometimes, especially after the children had eaten their soup and had no patience to learn, Fabian climbed on the chimney and conducted a sing-along.

  He wasn’t a musician like Dezo Kovac, who read notes and played the violin, but he was a performer and a clown. The children left their stalls and settled on the dirt floor like a flock of birds. The earth was bumpy and cold but the youth assistants swept the floor with rag brooms, which they had made from fine strands of jute.

  ‘What shall we sing today?’ He wrinkled his brow above his cracked spectacles.

  ‘Alouette,’ shouted Adam, and Bubenik and the girls joined in and they too cried, ‘Alouette’, which they loved.

  He opened his arms as if confounded by their choice. “Alouette”? What? Which Alouette? I don’t remember.’

  ‘You do, you do.’

  Fabian flicked his nose with his finger and nodded. ‘Ah, it’s Alouette you mean,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you say “Alouette” right away?’

  He strode up and down the horizontal chimney and sang the first line about the bird’s head. The children joined in and went on with other parts of the bird’s body to be plucked, the ears, the neck, the eyes, the elbows and the feet. The song went on for a long time, wild and rowdy, though not entirely out of bounds, because Fabian conducted the voices with his hands, his head and with his whole body. Some of the children moved their arms in time together with him and others, like Bubenik, took a bin and beat out the rhythm with his fingers. They were so absorbed by the tune they forgot the time and place and the squalor of their existence. Fabian started a Czech folk song and then another and afterwards a popular tune about nine canaries and a laughing gull who survived the flood. They sang and as they sang they transcended their misery. They were one body, which sang with one strong voice, and as long as they sang they were not unhappy.

  Sometimes the Camp Capo came to listen. Another time it was a convict craftsman from the Men’s Camp or even an SS sentry who didn’t understand the words but clapped his hands to the tune. Most of the children were Czech but even those who spoke German or Dutch followed the melody. At such times the Children’s Block was like a ship in the wilderness of the ocean and the sing-along was like a taste of home.

  * * *

  In the evening Alex Ehren told the girl about his family.

  ‘Towards winter all my seven uncles and aunts went on a pilgrimage to the village. It wasn’t much of a village but rather a hamlet between a meadow and a forest. By that time my grandfather was dead but there were two old people, a brother and sister, who lived in the house with the thatched roof and earthen floor. The house had two rooms, one with a bed and the other with a trestle table and four ancient chairs. They were full of woodworm and so brittle that we weren’t allowed to play hide and seek among them. Dry garlic hung from the beam and the kitchen ceiling was so low that even I could touch the wreaths.

  ‘We drove to the hamlet before winter because the old people were too weak to walk in the snow to the grocery store in the next village. The highway ended a long distance from the house and our car struggled up the lane lined with blackberries, ferns and frightened rabbits. My seven aunts and uncles parked their cars at the duck pond and we carried the flour, butter and smoked meat inside the hut. Sometimes I stepped into goose droppings and the village urchins jeered and hooted at me from behind a linden tree. Up the stream the old people owned a stretch of meadow and I waded knee-high in the uncut grass. The old man didn’t keep cows any more, but there were still bales of straw in the shed, and when Aunt Sofie ladled out coffee from an iron pot, it smelled of dung. Uncle Hugo broke pieces of cake into his mug and sucked them loudly. He had only a few teeth left and his cheeks were sunken and hollow. Yet he was still strong and tall and enjoyed his food.

  ‘The family lived there for six hundred years. Sometimes we were chased away but we returned to the house and the pasture. Horse and cattle dealers, that’s what we were. They left on Sunday morning and walked far, even beyond the German border. Nobody would stop a horse dealer because we catered to the nobility. Bought a sick horse and kept it in the meadow until it fetched a price. “Times were better then,” Uncle Hugo said, “because a handshake was a man’s word. No honesty among people today.”

  ‘He crumbled another piece of cake and I knew he would speak about his name. He always spoke about his name and I remembered every word of the story and every twist of his voice and yet we sat and listened, because he was so old that he had forgotten that he told us the same story a dozen times already. It was the most important thing he knew and he spoke the words as if he were laying bricks.

  ‘“It was my grandfather,” he said, “may he rest in peace, who was given the name. There was a war and the price of bread went up and up until people ate the bark of trees. ‘I’ll go and find out about the enemy,’ my grandfather said to the general. ‘How many men and how many horses and where they will attack. I will take a cow with me to cross the border.’ ”

  ‘The old man drank some coffee and looked at the children.

  ‘“It was a dangerous thing to spy on the Prussians. If they found out that my grandfather was spying they would hang him from a tree. But who would suspect a Jew with a cow on a string?” The old man laughed and ran his fingers through his beard. “The E
mpress sent two regiments to the border and the Prussians never came to Bohemia. Saved the Empire, he did, and Maria Theresa paid him three gold talers and gave him a new name. ‘Ehren,’ she said. ‘From now on you will be called Ehren, which means honour, because you saved us from the Prussians.’ ”

  ‘We never stayed there for a meal, because we wouldn’t let old Sofie cook for so many people. But when we parted she touched my cheek and fingered the cloth of my coat and her voice was full of envy.

  “Such cloth,” she said, “and such fat children.” There was a hint of regret in her voice. “It is easy to marry if you are rich,” she said.

  ‘She had never travelled on a train or visited us in town because she was afraid of trains. It must have been difficult for the old people to go on a transport.’

  They sat and were silent, and Alex Ehren thought about his own fears.

  ‘I mustn’t be afraid,’ he said, ‘because I am an Ehren,’ and he and Lisa Pomnenka laughed at the notion that a name might save anybody from fear.

  * * *

  There were things that helped and there were others that grew on people like moss on a stone. Alex Ehren saw the skeletal prisoners wrapped in a blanket, bent and dragging their clogs in the mud. He knew some of them and he was surprised how old they had grown. Once he watched his teacher, a professor and scientist, wade through the muddy silt. At first he couldn’t recognise him because the man, who had always been neat and well groomed, was now just another bedraggled prisoner. One of his clogs got stuck in the mire and he stood with his naked foot lifted like a bird. He groped for the clog and fell on his face in the dirt.

  It was as if the three months in the Family Camp had added thirty years to the prisoners’ age, twisting their backs and folding their faces into wrinkles. It was the hunger, the dirt and the exposure to death that rode through their time like the horses of the Apocalypse.

  ‘I won’t succumb,’ Alex Ehren repeated stubbornly, ‘and I will not go under.’

  He was fortunate, he thought, that Himmelblau had taken him on the Block, that Pavel Hoch shared his parcels with him, and, above all, that he was in love with the girl. For love, more than anything else, was a remedy against corruption and decay.

  And yet he was often desperate.

  Six hundred years, he thought bitterly, six hundred years in the same village and a name of honour granted by an empress. What use are the name and the years, if I am a Jew and a stranger in my own country?

  * * *

  After work the instructors talked. They knew the time of their death but they argued as if there was a future and freedom of choice. And then there were the children, who were a duty and an obligation, who provided the meaning for their existence. Most of them were like Alex Ehren, who, until the outbreak of the war, believed that he belonged. The fields, the rivers, the forests and the hills were his country because he read the same books, and laughed at the same jokes, as his Czech friends. The only difference, he thought, was their religion. Some of his classmates were Catholics, some Protestants and others Jews. They dated the same girls and some, like Pavel Hoch, who would marry his sweetheart Aninka, would have non-Jewish children. Yet with the German invasion and the New Order in Europe, they were set apart, robbed of their possessions and, at the end, taken to the camps.

  Their neighbours were solicitous and bought them food, which the Jews were not allowed to purchase. But when the day of their departure arrived, the neighbours watched them leave from behind their curtains and hurried to take over their abandoned homes.

  ‘It was like losing the ground under my feet,’ said Alex Ehren. ‘At first my schoolmates came to see me every day. They even brought me homework. “It can’t last,” they said. “In a couple of months you’ll be back. What a stupid law that Jews can’t attend school.”

  ‘I had to wear a yellow star and they wouldn’t walk with me in the street and came less and less often, and when we had to move in with another Jewish family, they stopped visiting altogether. It was as if I were dead.’

  ‘Being a Jew isn’t a choice,’ said Beran. ‘There are things that cannot be changed. I am who I am, tall or short, a gentile or a Jew. And as I cannot change my identity, I have to live with it.’

  ‘How do you live with it?’ asked Fabian, gesturing with his hand to the stalls of the Block.

  ‘We are not the first. There were the persecutions of the Middle Ages, the Crusades, the Inquisition and the pogroms of Kishinev. Yet some of us always survived to tell the story.’

  ‘What story? About being the scapegoat for other peoples’ misfortunes? When there was a plague, they claimed that we had poisoned the wells, and when there was no harvest they accused a Jew of murdering an infant. Aren’t we always the cause of wars, famine and disaster, murder and arson?’

  ‘It’s because we carry a message,’ said Beran.

  ‘What message?’

  ‘The Ten Commandments,’ said Himmelblau, who had joined the group.

  ‘And Christianity,’ added Marta Felix, who had studied philosophy and history at university. ‘The idea of justice.’ She had been married to a German, a humanist and writer, who had divorced her rather than lose his tenure. ‘Sometimes we were only the soil on which new ideas grew. We provided the beginning and the impulse. But whenever there was progress and improvement we were there.’

  She stopped and shook her head.

  ‘How strange that most of our ideas have turned against us. It was we who proclaimed that thou shalt not murder and we were the most murdered people on earth. The Jew Jesus Christ preached love among people but the history of the Church is one long record of torture, murder and burning of the Jews. The Jew Sigmund Freud opened the locked rooms of the human mind and another Jew Albert Einstein found the equation of the infinite, but their books are burnt in a Teutonic auto-da-fé. We are hated because we are the Rothschilds and the Marxes, though I don’t think we are either. We are just like any other people, good and bad, clever and stupid, rich and poor, but as Jews we are punished for whatever we are.’

  ‘We are not like other people,’ said Shashek, who usually kept his mouth shut. ‘We have no country, no government and no army.’

  ‘After the war I’ll go to Palestine,’ said Beran slowly and there was something childish in his words, because from where he stood the Jewish country was far away and unattainable. Many of the teachers were Zionists while others, like Felsen, believed in a communist revolution, and Hynek Rind dreamt of living in a small Czech town. Yet all of them without exception had a vision that kept them above the waters of despair. They couldn’t work with the children without a star, a flag or a dream to look up to. They were not more moral or better educated than other prisoners in the Family Camp; they were hungry and tattered and cold, but the community of the Children’s Block made them transcend their misery and deal with matters beyond bare survival.

  * * *

  At the end of March Felsen gave Alex Ehren his assignment. They crossed the camp road to the Hospital Barracks. The storeroom was piled with beds, empty bottles and mattresses. Felsen bent under a bed and extricated an anchor of tangled pipes, which looked like a skein of snakes.

  ‘You will throw the thing into the electric wires and cause a short circuit.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alex Ehren, ‘I’ve seen the wires; they run across the camp.’ He touched the iron, which was cold and unwieldy. ‘It’s too heavy.’

  ‘You’ll cast it on a rope,’ said Felsen, and he drew his head between his shoulders. He was suddenly uncertain of his choice.

  ‘A rope?’

  ‘The girl will make for you a macramé cord. Tell her you need it for the tug o’ war.’

  Everybody knew that Alex Ehren’s group was good at the game because they often won against older and heavier rivals. The three boys, Adam, Neugeboren and Bubenik, were like cockerels; they dug their clogs into the muddy ground and pulled until their faces were puffed up and red from the strain. They gave a sudden tug, which made the oth
er group slip and let go of the rope. Adam was a nuisance and often made Alex Ehren’s life miserable, but when they won he loved even him. He thought about the children who would be caught in the uprising, the blackout, the fire, the chaos and the shooting. There is no choice, he said to himself and wondered if any of them – one or two or several – had a chance to cross the river and reach the Slovakian border.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ll throw the anchor. How will I know?’

  ‘Somebody will tell you. There is enough time.’

  Afterwards Alex Ehren was of two minds. He was glad that he was a part of the mutiny but at the same time he was scared of the terrors it would unleash. He was in love with the girl and their togetherness was a shelter against misery.

  ‘There’s no hurry with the rope,’ he said to Lisa Pomnenka. ‘We’ll need it when the ground behind the Block dries out.’

  4.

  THERE WERE SEVEN BOOKS ON the Children’s Block. During the night they were locked in Himmelblau’s cubicle, together with the can of medicine and the crushed cakes of the orphaned parcels. However, during the day they were shepherded by Dasha, one of the youth assistants. She was a thin girl with woollen stockings, and she kept the books in a row, arranging and shuffling their places according to a mysterious scheme.

  There was H G Wells’s A Short History of the World and Elementary Geometry for High Schools, a tattered French novel and a Russian dictionary, which Felsen studied in preparation for the arrival of the Soviet army. Dasha also had an outdated atlas showing empires that had long ago ceased to exist, and three-quarters of a nineteenth-century Czech village novel.

  Himmelblau kept the twenty adolescents aged fourteen to sixteen on the Block to save them from slave labour in the open. There was Bass, the oven boy who fought about every piece of brown coal; there was Thomasina, the Dutch girl who assisted the kindergarten teacher; and Foltyn, the door boy, who wore a great coat that Himmelblau had got for him in the Clothes Storeroom. There was also a flock of girl sweepers, who cleaned the floor with brooms made by Shashek from old sacks. The earthen floor crumbled and the sweepers sprinkled it with water until it became soft and muddy. They swept the floor so many times that it sank and formed a step at the gate.