The Children's Block

by Otto Kraus

  * * *

  The day after, they mourned. They mourned as they had not mourned before, although there had been other dead – Lisa Pomnenka’s father, the children who succumbed to encephalitis, the old man with the smouldering fire and Alex Ehren’s friend Beran. There had been the frozen corpses that lined the road to Birkenau, the Hungarians and even Julius Abeles, who died of human envy and greed. It wasn’t Edelstein and his family for whom they mourned but for themselves, and the Kaddish they recited was not only for the dead but also for the living.

  Weren’t they the Exiled and the House of Israel, thought Alex Ehren, and weren’t they all as if dead already? Edelstein was, for them, more than a person. He was a symbol and a name, a kind of incantation against the unknown. Back in the ghetto they had grown to believe that his name created a protective wall between them and the Germans and now, when the wall was gone, they felt naked and exposed to evil. They also mourned Aunt Miriam, Edelstein’s wife. The children had become accustomed to her quiet ministrations; it was she who handed out the morsels of sweets after their competitions and without her the Block was cold and orphaned. They mourned the boy Aryeh, their mate and brother, not only because he was dead, but because they saw how fragile their own existence was. There had been the children of the September transport, who were sent to Heydebreck and there were others who fell ill and passed away, but Aryeh was the first child that was taken away and executed. Why was he shot? For what crime? For what reason?

  The instructors tried to assuage the children’s apprehension.

  ‘Aryeh may be well and alive in some other camp,’ said Alex Ehren, but the children were no fools and were afraid and mourned.

  * * *

  The Block still functioned. There were no charades but the Satan in the puppet theatre grew even more daring than before and the children produced so many poems, little drawings and stories that there was no place to pin them all on the wall. The teachers perambulated among the groups and continued narrating the next chapter of their book, and in the evening they kept playing the game called ‘the circle’. Marta Felix taught the older groups a bit of Plato and the boy Foltyn never missed a lesson and sat in the corner of the stall, fascinated by her explanations. Beran’s book of verses was much in demand, and whenever Fabian read from it aloud, they remembered the tall, clumsy man, who had died to save the life of another.

  They thought about the mutiny. One morning Alex Ehren brought the iron anchor from the Hospital Block to the Clothes Block where, so Felsen believed, it would be more accessible in time of need. He went to the Infirmary in broad daylight and extricated the object from under the bed. He wrapped the welded hooks into a blanket and then he and Foltyn carried the thing across the camp road as if they were disposing of a dead body. Alex Ehren tied a rope to the iron and hid it under a heap of wooden clogs.

  The days were bright with sunshine and the children played games until the green stretch between the Block and the fence turned yellow and hard. The outlines of the prisoners’ lives, like a landscape before a storm, grew more intense, clearer and more pronounced. Most of their future was not in their hands, but some of them had to make decisions.

  Towards evening Alex Ehren met Agnes. She was looking good, and well groomed, though her eyes were tired. He noticed her smart jacket and boots and the woollen kerchief she wore over her fair hair.

  Agnes had done well in the last weeks. She was a forewoman in the workshop, and the Capo had promised her that when they were transferred to a new camp, she would become a Block Senior or a Capo. There was a strange arrangement in the prison universe that convicts of rank carried their privilege into another camp.

  ‘I am leaving Majda behind.’ She averted her eyes. ‘Who will look after the children when we are gone?’

  ‘I don’t know, some of the older women perhaps. They will not be alone.’

  It was a lie, he thought, because once the Block was dismantled, the children couldn’t survive.

  She knew too but tried to pretend.

  What did she want from him? To tell her to abandon the child and remain alive? Or die with Majda when their time came? Who was he to tell her, a stranger, a young man who could have been her son? Or did she think that the teachers, matrons and instructors should stay behind and look after their wards?

  Children under sixteen were not in the transport lists. Most of the mothers wouldn’t abandon their babies and asked the Registrar to strike out their names from the roster. However, some women like Agnes, who believed that there was no sense in dying with their children, opted for life. Nobody knew what would happen in the next days, though there were rumours that the strong and young would be spared and sent to a labour camp in Germany.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he repeated and felt guilty together with the woman.

  ‘I may have other children one day,’ said Agnes.

  She didn’t look into his face and stood, young, feminine and desirable even in the squalor of the camp road.

  * * *

  After the Plato lesson Foltyn stayed in the stall. He lingered, leaning his back on the beam and waited for the teacher to fold the scraps of paper on which she had written her notes. They had grown friendly in the fashion teachers and pupils do and she enjoyed the boy’s eager mind, his questions and his interest in philosophy. He reminded her of her own adolescence, she thought wistfully, the quest for answers, for direction, the confusion of a world too rich to be grasped. Yes, she thought, the boy had the mind and the curiosity of a student and she was glad to teach him. Yet how long did they have: a day, two, a week?

  ‘More questions?’ She was ready to sit with the boy and speak about Plato.

  ‘I have never been with a woman,’ said the youth, and his face was flushed with embarrassment.

  ‘What is it?’ Marta Felix was startled.

  ‘I have never been with a woman.’ He looked at her neck, her breasts and her hands that lay folded in her lap.

  At first she didn’t understand but when she did she was amused. She would have laughed but she didn’t want to hurt the boy, and stopped herself. It was absurd, she thought, like incest almost. She was forty, an old woman by camp standards, and Foltyn was a child of sixteen, seventeen perhaps. What would people say if they heard about the proposal: Fabian; Himmelblau; or her lost friend Miriam? Yet then she looked at the boy again, young and inexperienced but eager to grow up before he died.

  ‘Will you sleep with me?’ he mustered all his courage and spoke fast and loud. For I have never.’

  ‘I will,’ she said, glad that she was still alive and able to do something for the living. Like most of the women in the camp, she had lost her cycle and hunger caused her to forget her femininity. Yet all that didn’t matter in the last days of the camp, for the important thing was life at the time of its living.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied with abandon, ‘I will sleep with you.’

  She knew that it wasn’t love but rather necessity that made Foltyn ask her, but she was flattered and almost happy. She felt more alive than she had for a long time, but at the core of her heart she was sad, and had she not been shy in front of the boy, she would have cried.

  * * *

  There were almost twelve thousand inmates in the Family Camp and the selections took Dr Mengele several days. He used the Children’s Block for the task because all the other barracks were crowded with sleeping bunks and smelly with unwashed prisoners.

  Alex Ehren undressed and folded his rags behind the Block where the children had played tug o’ war, danced as flowers and bees and bears with Magdalena, the gym teacher, and where he had lifted the blue-veined rock. The stone was still there, close to the wall large and unwieldy, and he wondered whether it would remain there after he was gone, forever. The Camp Capo, bent forward, limping and leaning on Adam’s shoulder, marched the procession up the road. They were a strange pair, the hunchback and the little boy, dressed in identical clothes, a tailored jacket, a striped beret and polished boots. They were like grotes
que twins, a caricature and a counter image of each other, reflected in a distorting mirror.

  ‘Step sharply,’ the Capo shouted, ‘and look alive. You are going to work and not to a pub to drink beer.’

  They took with them the youth assistants and the boys from Aryeh’s group who could pretend that they were sixteen.

  The younger boys remained on the bunks where they tumbled and caused mischief. They climbed like little monkeys with haggard faces, up and down the empty pallets, wreaking havoc on the folded blankets, and stealing bread from under the mattresses.

  * * *

  Alex Ehren waited in the naked queue outside the Block gate. The prisoners were let in one by one in fast succession and as he moved closer to the door, Alex Ehren’s mouth grew dry with fear. For three years his life had been ruled by queues – the registration in Prague, the transport to the ghetto, the daily line-ups for food, for medical examination, for the train to Auschwitz, and the final queue for his life or death.

  The SS doctor had a table placed in front of the door. He stood there, clean and elegant and well educated. He was the scion of a wealthy family and had never been hungry, degraded or abused. He felt nothing for the naked prisoners whom he condemned with his gloved hand, right to slave labour and left to their deaths. They came in, pale and cringing, stopped for a moment and then disappeared forever. They were like water that flowed in a stream, a job to be done, an order to be carried out.

  ‘Your age and profession,’ he said. It was a tedious and unclean task and he drank of the brandy that he put on the table. The table-top was scarred by Shashek’s seven trades and an orderly had covered it with a baize cloth. Sometimes the SS physician looked up and saw the painted wall, the stalls and the scraps of paper the children had pinned on the dark planks.

  The children, he thought, will have to go. Things had changed and Berlin had no use of them any more. He felt sorry for the Children’s Block, which had been a responsibility for many months, and he was lenient with the adolescents. When Bass, the oven boy, lied that he was sixteen, he overlooked the obvious and sent him among the living.

  * * *

  He kept a vestige of decency and men and women undressed in separate contingents. When it was the day of the female barracks, the SS officers who were not on duty came in, stood at the wall and watched the selection, as they had done during the Wednesday children’s performances.

  They ogled the naked bodies, smoked cigarettes and exchanged smutty remarks about this and that, and sometimes regretted that such an exquisite nudity should go to waste. Some of them were aroused by the young girls, the virgins and nymphets with their budding breasts and only an intimation of hair on their crotch. The doctor was liberal with them too and let the girls pass because it didn’t really matter whether they lived or died. They might grow up in a camp, or if they were not up to the slave labour, they would perish there. He was, he thought, not a cruel man and he didn’t want to rob them of their chance.

  Sometimes the German doctor played a joke on a prisoner. When Magdalena walked in, naked and barefoot, the doctor remembered her from the Children’s Block.

  ‘Profession,’ he asked.

  ‘A dancer.’ The young woman blushed and looked away.

  ‘Then dance.’ He pointed with his cane at the horizontal chimney stack.

  She was uncomfortable under the greedy eyes of the SS officers, but she climbed on the chimney, naked and unprotected by her rags. There was still the old table, the wooden stage where the children had performed their shows, their Robinson Crusoe and Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ and where, once a week, Fabian and Marta Felix had put up the puppet theatre. She was ashamed of her nakedness and conscious of her pubic hair and bare breasts, but she stepped on the stage and danced. It was a dance, she understood, of life and death and she tiptoed lightly on her feet and turned and pirouetted. She moved gracefully and lifted her arms and held her head high like a swan and kept dancing with her eyes closed with fear and her cheeks hot with embarrassment.

  Some of the officers clapped hands and laughed as they used to do during the children’s parties. The gym teacher didn’t know whether to go on or stop dancing and she stood irresolutely in the middle of the stage.

  ‘Enough,’ motioned Dr Mengele, grinning. And then, after a moment of pretend deliberation, he sent the dancer among the living.

  * * *

  Alex Ehren was exhilarated by his chance to live. There would be no need to fight, to torch the Children’s Block and to gamble with his life. He forgot the mutiny, the triads, the underground movement and the iron contraption under a pile of wooden clogs. All of a sudden he was utterly selfish and refused to think about those who had been rejected and would stay in the camp to die. What mattered was that he was among the lucky ones who would be shipped to a labour camp, and the ten thousand others – the children, their mothers, the elderly, the weak – were for him of no consequence.

  In the past he had steeled himself for a curfew, for Capos, SS sentries and trucks in the night. He thought that the horror of the September transport would be repeated, and he lived and clung to the idea of a mutiny, of setting the camp on fire, of desperate fighting and of many dead. He also thought about a breakout and a possible escape to the Slovakian mountains. In his mind he had rehearsed a hundred times the casting of the iron hook, the attack on the watchtower and the desperate dash towards the faraway trees. He had sharpened his spoon to a fine point and hidden it in a loaf of bread, and he kept a jacket without the red paint mark under his mattress.

  All that was changed now. However, he still had doubts. Would they really be sent to work or were the lists, the selections and the preparations for a transport just a German ploy to deplete the camp of the young and strong? Hadn’t Julius Abeles been a spy after all and weren’t the Germans just getting rid of potential fighters?

  During the days of the selections there was no school, and the children roamed the camp in packs and begged for food at the kitchen. There was chaos everywhere and yet the instructors still looked after their groups. They sat with the children on their bunks or walked outside or played games in an attempt to maintain a semblance of normalcy. In the late afternoon, a short time before the evening roll call, Adam Landau pulled Alex Ehren by the sleeve.

  ‘Brought you something,’ said the brat, and he handed Alex Ehren the golden bead.

  ‘I can’t. You’ll need it perhaps.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said the boy, who looked like a mannequin in his fine jacket and the armband of a Capo runner. His face was smooth and he smelled of soap. ‘I’ll be a runner in the Men’s Camp. Plenty of food there.’

  ‘I may lose it where I go.’

  ‘There is a train to Germany,’ said the child. ‘I’ve got it from a German guard. You are going away all right.’

  Alex Ehren had an urge to touch the boy and held out his hand. Yet Adam stepped back as if scared that he would be hit and played with his spoon honed into a scimitar.

  ‘I won first prize for writing a poem.’

  He lingered as if he wanted to say more, but then he turned and ran down the camp road, small, touched by evil and sharp like a weasel.

  * * *

  They slept on their crowded bunk for the last time. Fabian ran his hand under Alex Ehren’s mattress and held up the loaf of bread. He broke off a piece and stuffed it into his mouth.

  ‘Let’s celebrate,’ he said. ‘Let’s be merry because tomorrow we are going away.’

  He took the bread without asking, the loaf which Alex Ehren had saved for his escape by scrimping and scraping and going to sleep hungry. He ate with his mouth half open, greedily and lavishly until the crumbs fell all over the blanket.

  ‘Eat,’ he said and held out a chunk of bread to Pavel Hoch and Rind and even Alex Ehren. ‘It isn’t my bread but Alex Ehren won’t mind. I’ve let him have my postcard and he pays me with his bread.’

  There was ecstasy and abandonment in his voice as if he had suddenly lost his mind.<
br />
  ‘For once in my life I have taken what isn’t mine and that makes me free.’ For a while he played Satan again and rolled his words.

  ‘Mutiny!’ he exclaimed and tore off another piece of the black bread. ‘What fools we were to prepare a mutiny.’ He stabbed his finger at Felsen and laughed. ‘The communists and the underground movement? Who would have joined us – the Men’s Camp, the Kanada, the Buna people? They would have let us go down the drain. Many dogs bark but only the one in the corner will bite.’

  It was true, thought Alex Ehren, and he wondered at how blind he had been. The uprising was like a house of cards, which collapsed with the first gust of wind. And yet he felt that he was betraying the children.

  ‘Not true,’ said Fabian. ‘We’ve had our battle and we won.’

  ‘I see no victory,’ said Felsen, offended by his words.

  ‘Aren’t we alive? Look at the children, at the painted wall. Don’t you see the poems, the pictures and the little stories still fluttering on the beams of the Children’s Block? Uprising? We rose up all right and what’s more we got the better of the Germans.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dezo Kovac. ‘We are alive. We could have lost and been dead inside. We and the children.’

  For the last time perhaps, they slept on their overcrowded pallet like a many limbed animal, a centipede or an ancient Indian god.

  That night Alex Ehren showed Pavel Hoch and Fabian the last two pages he had written. They wrapped the diary in an oilskin and a piece of tar paper and buried it in the hole they had dug under their bunk. They masked the hole with a plank and covered it with silt which, when dried, hardened into a stone.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OTTO KRAUS was born in Prague. He and his family were deported in May 1942 to Ghetto Terezin and from there to Auschwitz, where he became one of the children’s counselors on the Kinderblock. He was married to Dita Kraus, whom he knew from the Kinderblock. She was the character on whom The Librarian of Auschwitz is based. Otto died at home on October 5, 2000, surrounded by his family.