The Children’s Block

by Otto B Kraus

  For the rest of the night and the following day the prisoners were kept in the sauna. They fell asleep one across the other on the concrete floor. When they awoke Dezo Kovac lit the Chanukah candles. They had been robbed of their luggage but some of them had hidden some food under their shirts and Shashek found a candle in his pocket. They sat in the corner, Alex Ehren, Beran and Fabian. Kovac broke the candle into two pieces and stuck them on the concrete floor. They kept together in a circle to screen the candles from the SS sentry at the door.

  ‘These candles we light in memory of the miracles thou hast made for our fathers and for us in days past and in the present time.’ Dezo Kovac was the only one who knew the Hebrew blessing, but they did remember the Chanukah song and watched the flames move with their breath.

  There was a man, a musician and composer, with whom Dezo Kovac used to play the violin. He sat on the ground with his head hanging over his knees and his hair wild and dishevelled. He was an artist and the journey and walk among the dead had unsettled his mind.

  ‘I’ll sing for you,’ he said and stood up. He put up his hands and sang in a thin feminine voice, moving his hips and dancing in small dainty steps.

  ‘These candles,’ he sang, ‘we light in memory of thy miracles.’ There was little space for his dancing and he stepped on the lying men. The German sentry, a pale-faced SS Rottenfuehrer, noticed the commotion.

  ‘Silence,’ he ordered. ‘Shut up and sit down.’

  But the musician wouldn’t stop and when the soldier came closer he clawed his fingers into the sentry’s face like a bird of prey. The soldier fired a shot and the musician fell to the floor bleeding from his mouth. They added his corpse to the pile of the dead outside the barracks.

  ‘Miracles?’ said Fabian. ‘There are no miracles.’

  He thought about the frozen corpses along the ditch and shook his head. He spat on two fingers of his hand and snuffed out one of the flames.

  ‘Neither for us nor for our forefathers.’ And he extinguished the second candle and said doggedly, ‘No miracles and no God.’

  Later a gang of Polish prisoners with shaven heads tattooed a number on their left forearm. Some of the children struggled and cried, but others, like Adam Landau, were defiant and silent.

  After three months they had learned to live with death.

  3.

  BY THE END OF MARCH THE EVENINGS GREW LONGER. IT still rained most of the time and sometimes there was even snow, which the children formed into snowmen or into balls, which Adam threw at their faces. Towards noon the snow melted and the Polish workers spoke about the flooded Sola, a river the prisoners had never seen. The men who worked in the ditches suffered most because their rags froze stiff and the wind chilled their bones. Many of them died, and it took the Cart Commando all morning to collect the bodies from behind the barracks.

  Whenever there was a break in the rain, Magdalena took the children behind the Block to play games, to stretch and to run in a circle. The Children’s Block was the last barracks in the row and through the fence the children saw the railway and the platform.

  There were days without a single train but then two came in succession, with cars clanging and screeching as the engine manoeuvred back and forth to a halt. They watched a column of men and women in their ill-fitting Sunday clothes being marched away and there was another procession and then another until the train was empty and the locomotive departed with a whistle. A commando loaded the orphaned luggage onto wooden carts – the suitcases and the bundles and even the abandoned rolled-up bedding – and drove them in the opposite direction.

  Whenever there was a transport, Magdalena was unable to conduct a lesson because the children were fascinated by the train, the people on the ramp, the SS men and the barking dogs. They didn’t ask questions but instead watched and pointed their fingers at this and at that, and even laughed at a man who stumbled and fell. Magdalena wondered how much the children knew and whether they spoke among themselves about the people that walked away and vanished. She was glad they didn’t ask her because she didn’t know what to answer; whether she would be able to hide her own fear and lie about a labour camp, a factory or woods where the prisoners cut timber. What would she say about the chimney, the smoke, the red glow that lit their nights? Sometimes she caught wisps of their words and phrases, but the children sounded less scared than the adults. They didn’t know the meaning of death, she thought, and was relieved by her conclusion.

  In her earlier days the dance teacher had liked trains because there was magic in the distances, in the new faces, in the little gifts people brought and in the sadness of parting. The children were intent on the arriving people, but they were thrilled even more by the food that grew into pyramids after the transport was taken away. For the children were hungry. It wasn’t a hunger that could be stilled by a piece of bread, because they suffered from a need that grew out of many months of starvation, of a deprivation so deep that it encompassed not only their stomachs but their whole beings, their minds, their eyes, their hearts and their limbs. True, the children ate better than ordinary prisoners, and yet their hunger was an obsession and a craze, so that they were unable to think of anything else but the food that piled up behind the electric fence.

  The people on the train didn’t know where they were being taken. They had been told about a labour camp or farm work, and they had packed into their luggage a blanket and a pillow, warm clothes, a spare pair of shoes and a bottle of cold medicine. They sold their last silver and their wedding rings to buy food for the days before they would find work.

  When they were gone, the commandos piled up the food, each kind on a separate mound. There were loaves of farm bread, deep brown and round, built like a house of cards. There were winter apples that kept their fragrance for many months, black-rinded cheese, sausages and wreaths of garlic and hot pepper. It was an agonising sight, and the hungry children called their friends from the Block to see the riches. They left their stalls and stood at the fence – the instructors, the youth assistants, the matrons and even Himmelblau, the bespectacled Children’s Senior – and their mouths filled with bitter water.

  Towards noon most of the food had been put into crates and loaded on the returning train. The broken loaves, the sacks that tore and spilled on the ground and the meat no longer fresh were not shipped back to Germany, but were cooked into a soup for the children.

  Sometimes Alex Ehren met a friend on the camp road, but he didn’t stay long because he was impatient to go and sit with the girl. They cut their bread ration into thin slices and laid them out on a piece of paper. He loved their shared meals, which made them almost a family, and the stall, intended for three horses, became their home. They had, as she once said, a bubble within a bubble, a private world of make-believe on the Children’s Block island. They spoke about insignificant things, which, in the light of their affection, became matters of beauty. They laughed at the ever-falling rain, the mouse that lived in a hole under the wall and at the old man who burned infected clothes behind the latrines. Yet above all they touched.

  There were no secrets and no privacy among the deportees. They lived so close that they were unable to conceal a rag, a piece of string, a quarrel or a romance. The instructors didn’t deride the lovers who held hands and even Fabian, who used to rail at matters holy and profane, turned his head and pretended not to see. Sometimes Alex Ehren put his hand on the girl’s small breast and they sat locked in contentment, unaware of their surroundings.

  Once they kissed and his stool tipped over and they tumbled to the ground. It was droll and they laughed, but the next time he tried to kiss her, she shook her head.

  He was grateful that his bunk-mates didn’t make fun of him and the girl, though after their kiss and fall Fabian rubbed his nose and scoffed: ‘Only swallows make love on the wing. Did you think you are a bird, Alex?’

  By then they already knew the day of their death. There was a woman Registrar in the Main Camp, one Katherine Singer, who had
seen the lists and told them.

  ‘There is an “SB 6” written next to your number,’ she said. ‘You’ll get special treatment in six months.’ She was blunt because there was no reason for sentiment in the lunar landscape of death. ‘It’s better to know than to be blind. No time for solicitude. The truth narrows your choice and helps you decide.’

  She was a member of the organisation, a friend of the seamstress at the Clothes Storeroom and a believer in an uprising.

  It was frightening to know that they were going to die. But it was seven times more difficult to know the date of one’s own execution. Time heals, thought Alex Ehren bitterly, but my time has become my curse. In the past he wasn’t aware of time. It flowed leisurely like water, day after day and year after year and was only occasionally dotted by a memorable event.

  Now time became a commodity, a tangible object, a treasure, which had to be hoarded and saved. He counted his minutes like a miser who counts his gold and he mourned for each morning and each night that had passed. He was reluctant to sleep because sleep shortened his time to live. Time was like a river, which he craved to arrest, to stem with a dam, or like a fish become one with the current.

  It was a losing battle because his hours ticked away hopelessly and horribly and left him in a state of prostration. He started with a trove of days, seventy or eighty, and at the beginning he still had time to spare on small, trivial matters. Yet as the days unravelled from the skein of time, he regretted events he had missed, a book he hadn’t read, a place he hadn’t visited, a girl he hadn’t loved, for he knew that all these were irretrievably lost. Sometimes he wished he were like Beran, who had come to terms with his mortality.

  ‘Time is my enemy,’ said Alex Ehren. ‘It is like an animal that devours me from within.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Beran. ‘Time is a human invention. Like the clock. If you don’t worry about it, it won’t bother you. Time is like breathing. When you start counting your breaths they’ll choke you.’

  The gawky instructor still met Sonia on the camp road where they stood until the free hour was up. Sometimes they remembered poems they had read and they recited them together, helping each other out where they forgot a word or a line. Beran found pleasure in small things, in a new shoelace Pavel Hoch had stolen for him at the Clothes Storeroom, in a piece of potato he found in his soup, and in an ant he watched with his pupils. There was no anger in him, which Alex Ehren was unable to understand. Alex Ehren rebelled against the transience of life and sometimes tried to speak about it with the girl. Yet Lisa Pomnenka refused to talk about time.

  ‘I’m too stupid for philosophy. We’ll wait and see what happens. Today is today and tomorrow will take care of itself.’

  She went on with the simple acts of living, her shared meals with Alex Ehren, the macramé lessons and her painting of flowers and animals, which the children pinned on their bunks.

  ‘Why worry about things that I can’t change? Of course I am scared of the chimney, but most of the time I don’t think about it and that helps.’

  She unravelled an old sweater and knitted Alex Ehren a vest, which he wore under his shirt.

  ‘How long will I wear it?’ he asked, and she shook her head and laughed.

  ‘A month, a year, who knows. When it gets too old I’ll knit another. There are more important things than that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Painting the wall,’ she said, and looked at the dark cavern of the Block.

  Shashek, the handyman with the grinning face, hammered together a ladder on which the girl worked. She started at the entrance door, where the kindergarten children had their stall, and drew grass and flowers until the wall looked like a window into a different world. She was meticulous about every blade and each petal and her picture was clear and simple. Each day there was more of it and in the morning, when the children arrived at the Block, they looked at the wall and counted the new daisies above their heads.

  Alex Ehren knew that the girl wasn’t an accomplished painter; her pictures were groping, artless and outspoken. The charm was in their simplicity. Shashek watched her from his workbench, and though his face smiled, he was jealous whenever Alex Ehren sat with Lisa Pomnenka.

  By the end of March Alex Ehren was in love with the girl. He felt less scared, as if the touching of hands and the meetings of skin against skin helped him overcome the horror of time. There were still three months till the 20th of June, which was the day of their execution.

  The children didn’t seem to be afraid of dying. They feared the night, the SS soldiers, the dogs, the beatings and hunger but they were not scared of death. The smaller ones, Alex Ehren thought, were like plants or animals who are unaware of past and future, and thus they didn’t fear time. However, fear was like a contagious disease and as they lived with their mothers, they became infected. Their fear was often shapeless but it showed in the small drawings on paper scraps for which they rummaged in garbage bins. They drew the barracks, the fence, the SS sentries and a dog so huge that it filled most of the picture. Their drawings were full of angular strokes and their sun was like a spider suspended from a cloud. Yet Eva drew a family in a house under a tree and on the table there was a dish of steaming soup.

  Sometimes Majda’s mother, Agnes, came to the Block to ask about her child.

  She carried food barrels and shared a bunk with Sonia. Her coat was bespattered by soup, but she looked elegant even in her rags. She talked with Alex Ehren about Majda’s reading and writing and was pleased by the macramé, which the child had made for her birthday.

  Agnes looked at the teacher and wondered how old he was, perhaps not more than twenty. He might easily be her son, she thought, and he was certainly too young to understand. The camp was a place for the very young because men of forty, who had been lawyers, merchants and educators, grew prematurely old. They spoke about their past and shuffled about, unwashed, smelly, wrapped in their blankets, with their trousers trailing. There were women who had turned grey within three months, were wrinkled and bent and had lost their monthly cycle.

  It was, Agnes thought with horror, as if each day carried the weight of a year. Agnes looked at Alex Ehren and was suddenly afraid that she too would one day wake up old, toothless, with her flesh sagging. Yet she was also worried about the child and would have liked to talk with somebody experienced.

  There were things on the Women’s Block of which nobody spoke. How could she tell Alex Ehren about the strange men that visited women on their bunks? It was a secret that everybody on the women’s barracks knew and which she couldn’t hide from Majda. There were, on the one hand, the days on the Children’s Block, with its make-believe painted wall, and on the other, the nights on the Women’s Block, which like spoiled food, the girl couldn’t digest. What other reason could have made the child a bed-wetter?

  Her disorder was an annoyance because the women complained about the smell and discomfort. They pestered Agnes to move with the child to another bunk, to the back of the block next to the night latrines. She aired their straw mattresses and turned them upside down and at night put a motley collection of rags under the child. Yet the straw never dried out and the smell lingered, not only on their bed but also on their clothes. At dawn she rinsed her rags under a tap, but as she had nowhere to dry them, she hurried back between her shift of the morning barrels of tea and the midday soup, held the clothes in the wind and spread them out over their blankets.

  She was lucky that she worked as a barrel carrier and so could bribe the Room Warden. She spoke to the child, woke her in the middle of the night and wouldn’t let her drink her evening tea. Yet each morning the bed was soaked and she had to clean up and wash and hold up the blanket to dry in the wind. There was a bond of love between her and the girl with the ash-blonde braids, yet after some time she grew tired of the barrels, the child’s trouble and the complaints of her bunk-mates. She was still a beautiful woman with large eyes and the gait of a queen, elegant and ladylike, and each time Jagger,
the hunchbacked Capo, saw her labouring up the camp road, he took off his striped beret and bowed.

  ‘There could be another job for the gracious lady. Just say the word. The Capo is willing.’

  She turned her head and didn’t answer, but she thought about the other job and the heavier her burden grew the more she was tempted to give in to the Capo’s offer.

  The women in the Family Camp lived apart from their men. They met on the camp road before the evening roll call. The women, who were stronger than the men, handed their husbands and sons a morsel of bread or a spoonful of their soup, which they had saved from their rations. It was as if in the camp world the women had turned into mothers and the men into their sons or aged fathers.

  In the middle of March, the old Camp Senior, a German convict with the green triangle of a murderer, was allowed to join the SS and volunteer for the East Front. Willy, the German prisoner who replaced him, took a Jewish concubine. Their liaison loosened the discipline and some women slept with the cooks or Block Seniors who paid them with a bowl of soup or a bread ration.

  Alex Ehren knew that there were two kinds of convicts. On the one hand there were the camp officials, the Capos, the Registrars, the Block Seniors and the potato peelers who had enough food and were thus less exposed to death. Then there were the common prisoners, the labourers on the camp road, in the ditch and in the sweatshops, who lived on starvation rations and froze in the icy rain. They were unshaved and filthy, and finally succumbed to diarrhoea and to their lack of will to live.

  There were also the Polish craftsmen, like Mietek, the roof repairman, who visited the Czech Camp to meet the long-haired women. It was dangerous to have sex in the camp because if a convict was caught he was punished terribly. The Capos, the Block Seniors and the artisans paid the women with bread and stolen goods and slept with them in the Block Senior’s cubicle at the barracks entrance. When a German sentry entered the camp the first prisoner who saw him exclaimed, ‘Attention, attention’, which was repeated by the guard at the next block and then at the next, until the whole length of the camp reverberated with the warning. The lover left by the back door and the woman hurried back to her workshop, clutching the piece of bread under her apron.