by Otto Kraus
He secured a job on the Rollwagen Commando where he pulled a cart, harnessed to it like a horse. They transported the dead to the incinerator, garbage to the dump and rags to be deloused, and they returned with coal or beetroot and potatoes for the soup. The commando people stole provisions, bartered them for other goods, which they sold at a profit. They were the only inmates that left the compound and could trade with the Kanada prisoners, who sorted the looted luggage.
At the beginning Julius acquired a needle and a spool of thread, which he leased for a slice of bread. He was shrewd and perseverant like a peasant, and was ready to go hungry for days in order to buy more goods. At night he slid down from his bunk and cut off buttons from the dead, which he sold for a spoonful of soup. Some prisoners refused to pay the price and stuffed paper under their shirts against the wind, but by the evening they gave in and paid Julius for his wares.
He had a stock of white bread and a powder against diarrhoea, but above all he traded in tobacco, which he bought from Mietek the Pole. The tobacco was poor stuff, black and coarse, mixed with sawdust and crushed stubs thrown away by German soldiers. There were prisoners who, like Himmelblau, couldn’t wean themselves from their habit and smoked away their bread rations. They rolled the tobacco in rough paper, which scarred their throats and burned fast and unevenly. The wood shavings flared up in fiery sparks and the cigarettes grew moist and went out. All that didn’t put off Himmelblau, who relit the fags until he smoked them to the last. At the end when the cigarette was so short that it burned his fingers, he stuck the stub on a match and sucked the last bit of smoke.
Julius Abeles bribed the Block Warden with half a bowl of soup to keep an eye on his treasures because he still worked with the cart. By now he could have bought himself a job under a roof, in the kitchen, in the carpentry or even in the Registrar’s office, but he preferred dragging potatoes and beets from the main storage where he met with the storeroom people.
‘You buy cheap and sell for a better price,’ he said to Alex Ehren. ‘That’s the trick.’ He leaned closer to his ear. ‘Look around and see for yourself. No funerals for the Block Seniors and the Capos. It’s the poor and miserable that die.’
He struck a deal with Himmelblau and became the Block’s go-between and supplier of goods. The Children’s Block got the parcels that couldn’t be delivered because their recipients were dead. The parcels were looted by the Capos and the SS, but they still contained a trove of food, bread and cake, dried apples, instant honey and sometimes even a glass jar of lard.
It was exciting to open the parcels, almost like looking into other people’s bedrooms, thought Miriam the head matron, because she often found in the bread, at the bottom of a jar, or once even inside an onion a message on a piece of oil paper. The parcels came from different countries and were a link with the world, a token that the prisoner was not entirely forgotten. Yet they were also a symbol of lost hopes because they were intended for people who were no longer alive. She thought about her husband, who was imprisoned in the Main Camp and of whom she knew nothing.
The Block would never have celebrated the Seder night had Julius Abeles not provided the food.
‘A shank bone, an egg and a piece of horseradish? And flour for the unleavened bread?’ He shook his head and wondered at the strange request. ‘The flour won’t be a problem but the other things will be difficult,’ he lisped with his eyes on the list. ‘Difficult, but not impossible.’ He always said that it was difficult but in the end he found – with a little profit for himself – what he was asked for: a Czech book; a piece of red cloth for the puppet theatre; and nails for Shashek, who was building decorations for the Wednesday show. He provided Himmelblau with his tobacco and the rags, which the girls sewed into mittens and mufflers.
The Auschwitz camps were a wilderness where nothing was impossible. The convicts’ food rations were so poor that each day scores died of starvation. There were selections and the weak and the old were sent to the gas chambers and then incinerated in the electric ovens. Yet while the barracks people died of hunger, the Block Seniors and Capos of the Kanada Camp lived in obscene abundance on the goods stolen from the new arrivals. The better foodstuffs and the valuables were to be sent to Germany, but some of the loot found its way into the camps.
‘One day,’ said Julius Abeles, I’ll have enough gold to bribe an SS officer.’
‘An SS officer?’
‘Everybody has a price. An SS officer isn’t any different from my shop assistant. For the right price he’ll let me run away.’
He dreamt about getting into the Kanada Commando, which packed the crates that went to Germany. It was a vain dream because the Family Camp inmates didn’t work on labour commandos and Julius Abeles had to content himself with trading in Himmelblau’s orphaned parcels.
* * *
They started their Seder feast in mid-morning because at dusk there was a curfew. They had only one Seder plate for all the children, which they passed from one group to another. It was a round piece of plywood with a bone, an egg, a sliver of horseradish and a tin cup of salt water, which were the tears of the slaves and the oppressed.
Aunt Miriam stirred beetroot jam into their morning tea to create a semblance of wine and she kneaded the dough and rolled it into small flat cakes. Shashek produced a baking grill from a piece of wire bent into a double loop, and Bass, the oven boy, held the dough over the fire until it was singed and browned on one side and then on the other. There was a bunch of children who watched the making of the bread, the mixing of flour and water, the kneading and rolling out and finally the mystery of baking the matzot. The smoke blackened the cakes and some of them were burned and crumbled, but at the end they had seven pieces of matza spread on Himmelblau’s table. At that time there were three hundred and sixty-seven children on the Block and so each of them had a bite, a tiny portion not bigger than a berry.
‘It is enough,’ Dezo Kovac said, ‘to have a taste of the matza. No need for more than a morsel as big as an olive. This is the unleavened bread our forefathers ate at their Exodus from slavery to freedom.’
Alex Ehren didn’t know the Haggadah because in his religion lessons he had barely mastered the square Hebrew letters, and he couldn’t understand the Aramaic sentences of the old text. However, as he told the story of the Exodus to the children, the boys and the girls, Hanka and Majda, and even Adam Landau the unruly brat, were silent, transfixed by the tale of the Jews for whom the sea had parted to let them cross from slavery to freedom. They drank the brew, which they called wine, and they chewed their one bite of sooty matza, and though Alex Ehren wasn’t as good an actor as Fabian, they listened until he finished the story.
Alex Ehren had taught them to ask the traditional four riddles about the difference between that night and other nights, and they sang the answers in their high-pitched childish voices. They weren’t strict about the ritual because they celebrated the Seder night at noon and the wine they drank was but the dregs of beetroot jam and their matza only a morsel of ordinary singed dough. They knew little about Jewish tradition and nothing of Jewish law and yet, as Alex Ehren looked at the burned bone, the egg, the bitter herbs and the salt water, something in him moved. He passed the one and only Seder plate to Beran in the next stall, who would pass it on over a beam to another group of children until it made a full circle of the barracks. They substituted day for night and tea for wine and they certainly wouldn’t eat a Passover lamb, and yet, though they lived in a world of make-believe, the Seder night was genuine.
Never before, he thought, had there been a more real Passover. They were humiliated and debased and deprived of their humanity. Their lives were like the dust of the earth and worth nothing. Their torturers had starved them until some prisoners went mad and others turned into animals. Yet as long as they believed in miracles, they weren’t entirely lost.
Alex Ehren looked into the dark abyss of the Block, at the beams, the stalls, the chimney and the walls. He saw his friends, the instruct
ors and matrons, the Zionists, the communists, the Czech Jews and the German Jews, and beyond them the children who listened to the choir with their eyes bright and wide open.
Dezo Kovac gathered his group of sweet-voiced children and they sang Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. The melody was, Alex Ehren thought, like a bird that rose to the rafters, through the narrow windows, to the tar-paper-covered roof and then into the freedom of the sky. It overrode their hunger, their misery, the smell of decay and their fear.
‘Joy, thou divine spark of Heaven, Daughter of Elysium…’
The tune spanned time and the barrier of space and carried them away from their death. They sang only eight lines, only sixteen bars of music, because that was all Dezo Kovac could teach them in such a short time. But they had rehearsed the melody so many times that all the Block children knew the eight lines by heart and as soon as the choir started, they joined the singers in an all-encompassing chorus. The three hundred and seventy voices grew into a chorale and reverberated from the roof and the wooden walls, where Lisa Pomnenka had painted her meadows and birds. They sang the melody again and again until, as if by magic, the song sprouted into a dream and all of them – the children, the youth assistants and the teachers – were, for a short moment, for a breath of time, unfettered and free from bondage. And in that one moment they defeated the Germans. They sang:
‘All men become brothers
Where Joy’s delicate wing rules’
and their voices branched out and flooded the adjoining blocks, the Hospital Barracks, the Clothes Storeroom, and the washroom and latrines. They even reached the SS doctor who knew the words and the melody, but wasn’t aware that the Jews were celebrating their freedom. He got up from his desk, crossed the camp road and listened. And when the children finished singing, SS doctor Josef Mengele nodded to Himmelblau.
‘Well done, Children Senior, carry on.’ He turned and left the Block.
* * *
At the time none of the Germans knew that on Passover day, which fell on Friday the 7th of April, they had been doubly defeated.
The children set themselves free by their voices, their wine and their unleavened bread. Their freedom, which they would remember until the end of their short existence, lasted but an hour, because shortly afterwards there was a roll call that lasted for the rest of the day deep into the night. They stood in the cold wind and the news travelled from one row to another.
‘Did you hear?’ the instructors whispered and repeated. ‘This afternoon, while the children were having their Seder feast, a Block Senior, one Slavek Lederer, escaped from the camp. Despite the electrified wires, sentries, dogs and chain of mines.’
The sirens started in a low voice but then they grew into a frenzied pitch. They howled for a long time, rising and falling until they died with a growl. At first the children didn’t pay them much attention since the sirens went off every time there was an escape. It was the Russian prisoners of war who broke out, but they were usually caught and brought back, bloody and exhausted, to be publicly hanged. Several days before, there were rumours of two prisoners, Rosenberg and Wetzler, who had reached the Slovakian border and who had promised to send a report of their plight to America, to England and to the Pope in Rome. There were similar reports almost every week but most of them were untrue and thus it was more important to survive the hour than to live on false hopes.
‘Who cares about the Jews?’ said Fabian. ‘Even if they got a report they wouldn’t lift a finger.’
They were in a place removed and forgotten, a planet so dark that it was invisible among the stars.
‘Some did escape,’ said Alex Ehren, ‘and not all of them were caught.’
‘Rumours, fairy tales and wishful thinking.’
There was, however, no mistake about Lederer’s escape because the Block Senior was indeed gone. He had been in the camp the day before and now the Deputy Senior took over, at first sheepishly and reluctantly, but after a day or two he became accustomed to his new rank, to the cane and the whitewashed cubicle at the entrance to the Block. It was immensely exciting that one of them, a prisoner whom they knew, broke through the fence, the ditches and the chain of armed sentries and was on his way to freedom. They didn’t know how he had managed to escape but in his feat there was hope for them all. Even the sick and the old, who dragged their feet and walked around wrapped in their blankets, awoke from their lethargy and spoke to one another.
‘Did you hear? Ran away in spite of the fence.’
‘Perhaps he rubbed himself with garlic to confuse the dogs.’
‘Where does one find food? Or shelter? Suppose one has to sleep in the open?’
The old men knew they wouldn’t escape. They were ill and weak and on the verge of death, but it was good to dream and have hope.
The Block Seniors made the prisoners stand on the camp road in the dark rain. The children, who were usually allowed to take the roll call inside the Block, had to remain together with the adults, hour after hour in the wind and drizzle. The smaller ones cried because they were hungry and cold and impatient. The older boys, Adam and Lazik and Neugeboren, pushed and pulled and tried to leave the row, but the sentries beat them back with a rubber hose.
Next evening all the male prisoners had to shave off their hair.
* * *
Alex Ehren didn’t know how many prisoners were involved in the underground movement. They were organised in triads and he knew nobody except Felsen who gave him his orders and Beran to whom he passed the word.
‘It’s a precaution,’ Felsen said, ‘against informers because people crack and confess under torture and pain.’
Alex Ehren knew little of the overall plan, of the leadership or of the contacts with other camps and he sometimes looked at his fellow instructors, at Fabian, Shashek and even Hynek Rind, and asked himself whether they too, like himself, had been given a task, a mission which they would perform at a given moment.
He was glad that it was Beran with whom he shared the secret because there was tranquility and poise in the tall ugly man, whose hair grew low on his forehead. A month ago they had learned the date of their execution and he counted the days and the hours he had left. There was no subterfuge, no protection, no walls between him and the truth and thus he stood naked against time.
‘Everybody is exposed to death,’ said Beran, ‘but some refuse to take notice. People hoard money, paint a picture, write a poem or compose music as a remedy against dying. They are fools because nothing protects you from death. Even the most miserable day is worth living.’
Sometimes Alex Ehren couldn’t follow Beran’s arguments and he shook his head.
‘Look how we live. How do I make my days worth living?’
Beran grinned and opened his palm as if to receive a gift. ‘Be like a fish. Don’t swim against the current. There are things you can’t change.’
‘I won’t die without a fight,’ Alex Ehren exclaimed. ‘Even an animal struggles when it is caught in a net.’
‘Struggle is all right, I suppose,’ said Beran, ‘as long as you don’t fight against time.’
Sometimes he wondered why Beran had joined the underground. If he was like a fish and didn’t fight against time, would he be ready to fight against the Germans? He collected poems, which he recited and taught to the children. The poems spoke about love, nature and fine feelings and were but another shield against fear. He was in love with his wife whom he met for an hour each afternoon and they stood leaning against each other in a silent touch. Neither of them was handsome, and Sonia’s bespattered coat and Beran’s ridiculous hat didn’t make them any more graceful. Yet there was tenderness and caring between them, and Alex Ehren wondered whether his gawky friend had indeed made peace with the current of time. In the uprising Beran was to set fire to the paliasses, and guide the children through a gap in the fence into the open.
* * *
The SS guards, who used to watch the puppet theatre or clap hands in time with Fabian’s ‘Aloue
tte’, stayed away or walked through the Block with locked faces. An SS sentry had been involved in Lederer’s escape and the camp commanders had forbidden any contact with the inmates. Many of the warders were not genuine Germans but Poles, Ukrainians and Magyars of German origin, who remembered their Teutonic grandfather only after the German conquest. They often spoke better Slovak, Romanian or Hungarian than the language of Goethe, and felt more at ease with the prisoners than among their comrades at the guardroom. They were a long way from home and sometimes slept with Jewish girls whom they paid with bread and potatoes for their favours. The women were young and attractive, and most of them better educated than the soldiers.
It so happened that one SS guard, a man called Pestek, a Romanian, fell in love with a prison girl. For some time they met at a Block Senior’s cubicle, but then the young man decided to defect, to save the girl and wait for the end of the war in a safe place. It was a daring decision for which the SS soldier needed money to buy papers, pay for a hiding place and provide food for the period of hiding. At last he found Slavek Lederer, a Czech Block Senior, who had the necessary means and friends in a village where they could find shelter.
It was a good bargain for both sides and thus on the 7th of April, the very day Alex Ehren and his friends celebrated their Seder feast, Unterscharfuehrer Pestek and the Czech Block Senior, dressed in SS officers’ uniforms and provided with stolen papers, walked out through the camp gate while the sentry stood at attention. They rode their bicycles to the nearest railway station, boarded an express train and by evening had arrived in Prague.
The story was leaked into the Family Camp by the man who swept the SS guardroom, the woman who worked at the post office in the Main Camp, and the artisans who came to the Block to have a look at the children. It was like a puzzle or a mosaic, which had to be collected piece by piece until they had a full picture. Alex Ehren waited a day and then another, but Lederer was never caught and never brought back to be hanged. After a week the Germans gave up their search, but the sentries remained cold and suspicious for a long time afterwards. They even stopped attending the children’s charades and shows.
