The Children's Block

by Otto Kraus

  And yet the instructors still told the children stories where good was rewarded and evil punished. The children often misunderstood and when Alex Ehren spoke about a poor family who lived on dry bread and lentils, Majda took her thumb out of her mouth.

  ‘They were not poor. They could have bartered their bread and lentils.’

  They took wrong sides and opted for the dragon, the witch or the giant rather than for the good and the simple-minded. They loved adventure and were ready to hear the same story again and then painted pictures of Robin Hood, the Slovak highwayman Jánošík, of Eskimos and Gulliver on scraps of paper, which Alex Ehren hung on the wall. Yet they also painted their fears and there were drawings of the fence, the dogs, the chimney and of soldiers shooting a prisoner. By the end of the month the escaped sentry Unterscharfuehrer Pestek was caught and executed and although they hadn’t seen him die, he too began to appear in the children’s pictures.

  Alex Ehren produced a board on which they played draughts and snakes and ladders. They loved games, but the boys cheated and whenever Adam Landau lost, he started a fight. By the end of April he still couldn’t read because he spent most of his mornings with Jagger, and was cockier and wilder than ever before.

  For a while he made peace with the teacher, but when he didn’t win another prize, he lost interest and stopped attending school. When Alex Ehren caught him lying, the boy spat on the floor and disappeared for three days, but then came back like a bad penny, for a round of tug o’ war and a game of marbles. The boys dug a hole in the dirt, shot their marbles and then crept on the floor to roll them into the kitty. The game became a craze and an obsession and the children could barely wait for a break to go back to their sport. The game had complex rules about which they quarrelled, disturbing the older children, who sat with Hynek Rind doing some geometry.

  ‘There is time for school and there is time for marbles,’ said Himmelblau in his funny Czech. ‘The teacher will keep your marbles and give them back at the end of the lesson. We will not close the school because of your game.’

  Alex Ehren collected the marbles and kept them on his shelf until the end of the lesson, but the children never handed over all of their marbles, or else they produced new ones and ran behind the Block to continue their game. They chewed bread and rolled it into pellets which when dried grew as hard as stone. Bubenik was a master of the craft and even older boys paid a spoonful of soup for three of his marbles.

  One afternoon Alex Ehren broke up a skein of fighting boys. They were excited and angry and, as so often happened, Adam was at the centre of the row. He stood against the wall with his fist clenched at his chest.

  ‘He cheats,’ they shouted. ‘Come on, Adam, show him the marble you’ve got.’

  ‘It’s mine,’ said the boy, and his eyes were like tiny flames of blue fire. ‘I worked for it and no bastard will take it away.’

  ‘Why are you hiding it? What is it, a secret?’

  ‘A winning marble,’ they shouted. ‘A golden marble that rolls into the kitty by itself.’

  They had no pockets and they kept their possessions in a knotted rag inside their shirts. This ‘satchel’ might contain a piece of string, a bread crumb saved from last night’s ration, a coloured button and, of course, their hoard of marbles.

  ‘Show him, show him,’ they clamoured, eager to expose the cheat. Some of the children lived with their mothers, but many were orphans and had to manage on their own. They were very young, some only seven years old, but they had learned to help one another with food and clothes and the small things needed for survival. At noon Alex Ehren collected a spoonful of soup from each child to let one of them have a second helping.

  ‘To give up one spoonful is nothing,’ Eva had said, holding her rag doll close, ‘but another helping is a treat.’

  They knew how many days there were to their second bowl of soup, three or four, and it brightened their mornings to know that at noon they would have a full stomach.

  They could survive only as a group, and though nobody said it aloud, they depended on one another like the organs of one body. The Children’s Block was run like a summer camp, a game, an illusion, an island. The children existed in a make-believe world, detached from the cruelty of the camp, but the group was real and solid and without pretence. The children had forgotten their past, their families were torn apart or dead, they had no home, no neighbourhood and no landscape to remember, save the ghetto walls or the barracks of their prison camp. They were uprooted, stripped of their names and starved until they were like animals. For many of them the group became a substitute family, the community to which they belonged and the only wholeness in a fragmented universe. The group was their identity and when somebody asked them who they were, they wouldn’t mention their father or their country, but the name of their group, because they were the Swallows, the Bears and the Maccabees more than they were anything else. But they could also be cruel and deadly to a boy who stole a piece of bread from his friend, cheated at marbles or broke the code of the community.

  ‘The marble,’ they sang now, ‘show him the marble.’

  Adam opened his fist and there was a golden bead, smooth and glistening and as heavy as a pebble. It caught the light that fell from the narrow window and it shone in its perfect roundness.

  Alex Ehren knew that there was gold in the camps, gold that had been sewn in the hem of a coat, hidden in a glove or in an aperture of the body. There was also the gold of the wedding rings, the filigree necklaces and the earrings stripped off the dead women before they were burned. The gold was melted down to ingots and sent to Germany, but some of the jewels were stolen and kept in a cache behind the bunks. Alex Ehren hadn’t seen gold since his mother handed over their Maria Theresa thaler coin to the Germans.

  ‘They can take the gold but they can’t take away the name,’ she’d said. But she was wrong because at his arrival in Birkenau Alex Ehren had lost his name and became the number that a Polish convict tattooed on his forearm. He didn’t mind too much because all of them had become numbers – Himmelblau and Fabian and his friend Beran and Marta Felix who had a PhD in philosophy. Whenever he met an SS sentry he had to snap to attention and present himself not by name but by number. Even the children had to remember their ciphers and he taught Bubenik and Majda and all the rest of his group to stand to attention and sing out the answer.

  ‘Here I am, prisoner number one-seven-zero-five-six-three, playing marbles or skipping rope or learning the names of German weekdays.’

  Alex Ehren was startled by the gold on the urchin’s palm. It was unexpected and full of dangers. The bead was smooth and opulent and carried the memory of lights, carpeted rooms, a potted linden tree. It also trailed the intimation of femininity and fragrance.

  ‘How did you get it?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Did you steal it?’

  ‘Worked for it,’ said the boy with his face sullen and angry. ‘Ask Jagger the Capo.’

  ‘Who pays with golden beads? What kind of work is it?’ asked Alex Ehren.

  The boy resented his questions and turned to run. He would stay away for a number of days, even a week and then return with a bribe. He was generous with his riches and handed out gifts with ease: to Neugeboren old sneakers; to Bubenik a mouth organ; and to Majda a kerchief. Sometimes he brought bits of food, a slice of salami, salted fish and even a raw egg. He was a small child and the Camp Capo’s visitors gave him things stolen from the new arrivals. The boy imitated the grand style of the Capo, his protector, who allowed him to wear the black armband of a runner.

  ‘The marble,’ said Alex Ehren and looked at the glistening bead. ‘Who pays with a golden marble? What kind of work is it that pays with gold?’

  Alex Ehren thought of the danger hidden in the precious metal, because if the boy was caught, the SS might beat him to death to learn where it came from. Children were not exempt from cruelty and torture, and possession of gold, which was a door to freedom, was a mor
tal transgression.

  He looked around at the other children but they were silent as if sworn to secrecy. They know, thought Alex Ehren, though for some reason they refuse to tell. Adam was a nuisance and a pest, who fought with the boys and cheated at marbles, but he still was a member of the group and they protected him like a wall of stones. Or was it not only his secret? Were others involved? He had to know, he thought, for their sake and for his own.

  He held the boy fast and shook him until his satchel opened and some of the marbles spilled on the ground.

  They were all grey and inconspicuous, and, save the one in his hand, none of them shone like gold. It was only much later that Alex Ehren learned about the boy’s work and the source of his prosperity.

  * * *

  At last Shashek finished carving the puppets. He had worked on them for three weeks, sculpting their heads with a broken blade. Lisa Pomnenka painted the faces, and, together with the older girls, sewed the clothes. They lifted the theatre onto the brick chimney. The chimney ran horizontally on the floor along the whole block, like a heated low wall with an oven at each end. From the ovens the chimneys rose up through the flat roof but it was only in the children’s block that they were ever lit. From underneath the trestle Fabian and Marta Felix moved the figures. It took a long time to produce the frame, the curtain and the decorations from the materials found around the Block. Shashek needed wood, nails and hinges for the trap door, items which he acquired one by one, from Mietek, from the camp carpenter and through Julius Abeles, the Cart Commando man. The decorations were important but the main attraction was the puppets, which Himmelblau kept in a wooden box in his cubicle.

  At the beginning there were only three characters: Princess Marmalade, King Dumpling and the jester called Send Helping. Later Shashek carved the Devil and Prince Sof-Tov, which was the Hebrew word for ‘happy ending’. They didn’t know much Hebrew, although Dezo Kovac conducted lessons for the Zionists. But they all – the Czechs, Dutch, Germans and even the communists – used the word sof to describe the end of the war. When the sof comes, they said, I’ll do this and I’ll do that. I won’t touch beetroot soup again, or I’ll put on my best clothes and parade along the river, or work for the world revolution, or go to Palestine, or write a book about the evil in man. The word sof was an incantation that brought alive their wishes and hopes, and although for each of them the word meant something different, for all of them it was a crown and a fulfilment. Sof-Tov was an appropriate name for the Prince, who at the end of each play saved Princess Marmalade from the clutches of the villain. Their first performance, for which Alex Ehren wrote the script, was on Monday. The play was written in Czech, but the Devil spoke German and clicked his heels like a soldier.

  ‘The language is not guilty,’ said Himmelblau. ‘There were Kant and Heine and Thomas Mann and even Albert Einstein who wrote in German. Why must the Devil speak German?’

  ‘The road to hell is paved with German words,’ replied Fabian, grinning. He enjoyed his satanic part; he didn’t know much German and so he invented new words, twisted and frightening and meaning nothing. He sat cross-legged under the table and improved on Alex Ehren’s script with rolled r’s and rattling g’s, and diabolic snorting, which the children loved. He was a good actor and soon the Devil was the most popular puppet on the stage.

  None of the instructors was a skilled puppeteer, but by and by they improved and on Monday the Block was always full of visiting craftsmen, registrars and even SS guards.

  They had to be careful with the text because some of the Germans understood a Slavonic language, Polish, Ukrainian or Croatian, and before every performance Himmelblau cautioned Fabian to curb his tongue and make the Devil speak Czech.

  ‘All right, all right. I admit that not everybody who speaks German is a devil—’ he grinned at Himmelblau and polished his broken lens ‘—though all the devils I know speak German.’

  * * *

  Shashek the handyman had marvellous fingers. He turned a piece of wood in his hands and then started carving, splinter after splinter, until he had a rough outline of a face. He deepened the hollow and smoothed the brow and then suddenly, out of wooden nothingness, emerged a shape, an image, a being.

  He had only a knife with a broken blade and the wood was unpolished and rough, but each puppet was alive with an inner craving and ambition. Each of the five manikins had a heart and a soul; it was unmistakably itself, and once finished couldn’t have been mistaken for anybody else.

  ‘Where did you learn it?’ asked Lisa Pomnenka, who admired his gift and artistry.

  ‘A bit here and a bit there. Made a toy horse for a nephew, nothing serious. I wanted to become a car mechanic, but Jews couldn’t be apprenticed.’

  She looked at his hands, which were big and cracked by the many tasks he was doing on the Block, and which moved as if they had a life of their own. He turned his palms upwards in a gesture of giving.

  ‘They don’t look like Jewish hands,’ he said and his face folded into its involuntary grin. ‘I suppose I inherited them from my mother’s side. My mother wasn’t Jewish. Her people were Protestants. Working class folks, one grandfather a smith and an uncle a coal miner. Big hands and small heads.’

  He stopped and blew away the wood shavings and the dust.

  ‘I didn’t want to be a Jew and sell shoes like my father. I wanted to use my hands.’ He paused and then went on. ‘My mother pushed me through school. “Jews are fine people,” she said. “They read books and live in good houses. They don’t come home dirty and don’t spend their evenings in a pub drinking beer. I want a better life for you and your children.’ ”

  He looked up and his voice was angry. ‘I’ll die because my mother wanted a better life for me and for my children. Why can’t parents let their kids live their own lives?’

  Lisa Pomnenka saw that he had carved her likeness into the face of Princess Marmalade and was flattered. What she wasn’t aware of was that he was in love with her and suffered each time he saw her together with Alex Ehren.

  * * *

  According to medical science the prisoners should have been dead. Sometimes the Jewish doctor crossed the road from the Hospital Block to listen to the children’s chests and to run his fingers over the boys’ spines. He was one of the survivors of the September transport and it was he who had brought Himmelblau Fredy’s whistle. The Youth Senior wore it on his neck as the gym teacher had done, but it took him a long time until he dared to use it. It was like wearing a dead man’s clothes, he thought, and he blew the whistle only in times of alarm or emergency.

  The physician conducted a study of sorts. He weighed the bread and calculated the nutritional value of their margarine and beet jam.

  ‘We live on four hundred and fifty calories a day,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘How long can a man survive on so little? According to the book we are all dead.’

  The hospital staff got more food because the Block Registrar wouldn’t report the deceased immediately and for a day or two the doctors and the nurses shared the dead people’s bread rations. The labourers, however, lived and pushed the iron wagons up the road, cleared the ditches and marched to work through the gates while the orchestra played ‘Marinarella’, ‘The Blue Danube’ and ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. True, many inmates died of exhaustion and disease, and each morning Julius Abeles and his Transport Commando mates carried their bodies to the crematorium. They went through the deceased people’s clothes and scavenged their last possessions, their buttons, the crumb of bread and sometimes even a coin or a banknote.

  Most of the prisoners owned nothing, not even their time. Their days belonged to the Labour Capo, and their mornings and evenings to the SS, who counted them at the roll call with the movement of a gloved hand. Sometimes they even worked at night in the white light of the projectors or had to forgo the one free hour when they met their families.

  Nothing was permanent in their lives. From time to time they were moved to another block or were shifte
d from one commando to another like pawns on a chessboard.

  ‘I have nothing,’ said Beran, ‘and so I have nothing to lose. Think of the people who have a home, a garden and a bank account. They are afraid to fall asleep because of burglars, fire and earthquakes.’ He spread his arms like a gawky bird. ‘I am free, because nobody can rob me of anything.’

  There was another freedom of which the SS couldn’t deprive them – the freedom to dream. Most of the deportees dreamt of food and in their minds they cooked imaginary feasts and indulged in orgies of food and drink. They compared lists of restaurants and argued about recipes for meats, gravies and salads. They spoke of fish, of fowl, grilled or fried in oil, and fought about condiments, soups and confectionery. The children had no memories of fine foods or cakes with whipped cream. They had never seen a fruit – a lemon, a pear or a bunch of grapes – because after the German conquest the Jews were not allowed to buy fresh fruit. Some of them had lived in camps for four years and the only delicacy they remembered was the yeast dumpling, which were handed out in the ghetto.

  Sometimes a visitor brought an apple to the Block and the fruit circulated among the children, who touched its skin, smelled it and fondled its roundness until it was cut up into tiny pieces and distributed among the smallest of them.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ said Alex Ehren, ‘and dream that one day you’ll have as many apples as you wish… a basket, a barrel and a cart.’

  The children chewed the bit of fruit and dreamt about the world.

  The puppets made Fabian even more popular than his ‘Alouette’. They asked him to roll his r’s and rattle his g’s and speak like the Devil, which he did with relish and gusto. He sang ‘Alouette’ with them and made them laugh with his fibs, but in the evening when the children left, he mocked himself and his friends who dreamt about Palestine, and memorised Hebrew words.