The Children’s Block

by Otto B Kraus

She came through the door, bent under the weight of her toolbox, looked around and disappeared into one of the whitewashed cubicles. She didn’t stay long and when she emerged, her box was light and empty. It was evening, almost the time of the roll call and there were no workers in the block. The girl opened the door a crack and hesitated before she slipped away and Alex Ehren wondered why she acted like a shadow and a thief.

  What was the secret she shared with the seamstress? Lisa Pomnenka was open and outspoken, almost like a child, a maker of macramé patterns and a painter of flowers and birds. What was it that made her sneak in secretly and make sure to leave unnoticed? What did she carry in the toolbox that was heavy when she entered and empty when she left?

  ‘Don’t you know?’ Pavel Hoch asked. ‘Haven’t you been friends for some time?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘What is it?

  ‘She carries bottles of kerosene and gasoline,’ Pavel told him. ‘We’ll set the camp aflame before we go to the gas chambers.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he reproached the girl in the evening.

  He was irritated that she had a life of her own, matters of which he knew nothing, meetings with the underground people outside the camp and a mission as important as his own. He loved her but his love was possessive and he wanted her to belong to him only, boundlessly, unequivocally, and as a part of himself.

  ‘It was my secret and not yours,’ she said, and her eyes were like a mountain pool, blue and deep and cool.

  7.

  THERE WAS ALWAYS A CENTRAL PIECE AROUND WHICH THE ENTERTAINMENT revolved. Once the pivot of the party was Aryeh’s charade, another time it was a puppet show, a song or even a guessing game. The SS sentries stood at the far end of the Block and laughed and clapped their hands, although they only understood half the words. It was a strange relationship between the soldiers in their good green coats and sturdy boots, and the mangy children in their miserable rags. The German soldiers spoke to Himmelblau and even to the children, but they knew that when the time came, they would drive them into the trucks and impassively watch them die.

  Many of the sentries were simple people – butchers, carpenters, farmers – but they knew that they belonged to the master race and the Jews were beings of a lower order, vermin, a cancer that had to be destroyed. Yet above all they obeyed their orders, and even when they laughed at the puppet theatre or the play, they wouldn’t hesitate to inform on the children to the Secret Service. The instructors taught the children to be wary of the soldiers with the skull and crossed bones on their collars and hats. Whenever an SS man appeared on the Block, they changed the butt of a joke or improvised a new sentence. Even Fabian lowered his satanic German because one of the sentries might understand, grow angry and issue a punishment to the actors or the children – a curfew, withdrawal of food or even a beating. They learned to start a song or a dance or a German language drill in the middle of a forbidden school lesson. The boys had a rag ball and the girls a doll, which they had produced in one of Lisa Pomnenka’s handicraft lessons, and at a moment’s notice they switched to play. It was like a game, though it wasn’t a game because the school, the newspaper and even the puppet theatre were like playing with fire.

  The groups of children competed at their performances, which they planned and rehearsed on their bunks and in the corner of the Block.

  When their turn came Alex Ehren held a consultation with his Maccabees and there was much shouting, excitement and disagreement. The girls wanted to perform a dance they had learned with Magdalena, and Bubenik and Lazik opted for cowboys and Indians, but in the end they compromised and agreed to stage Robinson Crusoe so the girls could dance and the boys disguise themselves as sailors and cannibals.

  Alex Ehren hadn’t seen much of Adam Landau since he had caught the boy with the golden marble, but now the brat was back – small, cocky and with the armband of a Capo’s runner.

  ‘We’ll write a play together. Yes?’ he said.

  After the previous week’s events Alex Ehren decided to punish him, to teach him a lesson, but when he looked at the child he was unable to refuse his eagerness. They sat together after school and Alex Ehren was again amazed by the child’s gift for words and rhythm. He didn’t know to read and yet he was like a fountain of imagery that spilled over in wasteful abundance and in two afternoons they produced a rhymed text.

  It was a short play and when he read the draft to the children they wanted to change this and that and so they sat together and corrected and added until they were satisfied with the script.

  Adam attended school without starting a fight or upsetting some girl’s stool. He couldn’t read with the others because he had forgotten the little he had learned, but he listened to the words and scribbled hooks and loops on a scrap of paper.

  ‘The Capo will manage,’ he said. ‘I’ve told him I had to be an actor for a couple of days. Invited him to see the play. OK with you, Alex?’

  There were two leading characters in the piece, Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday, but Adam wanted to be the ship’s captain who defeated the pirates and sailed home with Robinson.

  ‘A captain has a sword and a pistol, right?’

  ‘A skipper should be armed.’

  ‘To shoot bloody cannibals and pirates?’

  ‘If necessary.’

  ‘I’ll sure make it necessary.’

  They rehearsed on Alex Ehren’s bunk because they didn’t want anybody to know the tune, which Dezo Kovac had composed for the occasion. Lisa Pomnenka made Adam a captain’s hat and used a tin of shoe polish to mask up Neugeboren as Man Friday, all naked except for a grass skirt around his waist. All the children had a part in the play. Three of the boys were sailors, two were cannibals, Eva was a parakeet, Majda Robinson’s cat and the rest were animals in the forest.

  There was not enough room for all of them on the small stage and they used the smokestack, which for a short while became a tropical island with Robinson Crusoe, Man Friday, the Captain, the cockatoo, the dog and the cat. Two children dressed up as baboons and sat in the tree Shashek had built from planks and a cardboard box. They were just eight years old and the play lasted only five or six minutes, but they transported their audience into another world and made them forget the camp.

  Himmelblau had balked at the price Julius Abeles had demanded for a piece of foil, the red cloth and the feathers for the cockatoo. Yet when the play ended and the actors stood in a bunch on the platform, even he wasn’t sorry any more. There were things, he thought, that were more important than a piece of bread from the orphaned parcels.

  Everybody applauded and the actors repeated the refrain until the children knew the words and the tune. The hunchbacked Camp Capo pointed his cane at Adam, the captain with the cardboard sword and the tinsel hat on his shaven head.

  ‘Damned brat,’ he said in his booming voice. ‘Who’d have believed the brat is an actor?’

  The three SS soldiers rested their guns against their chests and clapped, and even the Priest, the shifty Block Senior, twisted his mouth and smiled. And then all the three hundred and seventy-two children with their instructors and matrons and youth assistants, the Camp Capo and even the locksmith, who came from the Main Camp to see the show, joined in and sang the words Alex Ehren and Adam had written for the play:

  Oh Robinson, oh Robinson

  Leave your island

  Leave your sorrow

  There is for you

  A happy morrow

  When you board

  The homebound ship

  Some of the sentries may have understood the words but only the inmates, the children and the youth assistants felt their inwardness. For they knew that Robinson’s island was not a faraway wild place, but the island of Birkenau, and the ship that came to his rescue was the flicker of hope they carried within their despair. They knew that they were condemned to death and that the date of their execution had been written in their files. And yet, despite their utter exposure to death, they harboured a h
ope, a spark, an intimation of a miracle. For one it was an escape, for another an uprising and for yet another his belief that they would be exchanged for German prisoners of war. It was like walking in darkness and seeing the reflection of a star on the water. Or, as Dezo Kovac the believer, had put it during the evening:

  ‘Evil is the space from which God withdrew. It is like a pocket empty of God’s essence. But even in the void there remains the memory of his presence. If you believe you can survive. One has to learn from my loyal brother Job.’

  ‘Your brother Job?’ said Hynek Rind. ‘Your brother Job wasn’t in Birkenau. No selections, no starvation, no chimney and all that. Didn’t he get everything back with interest? His home, his goats, his bank account and even his children? I would gladly switch places with him.’

  However, the memory of the play remained and the girls asked Lisa Pomnenka to draw Robinson’s island on the wall.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘There is no ocean in the middle of the meadow.’

  She was behind with the wall because Dr Mengele kept her more and more occupied with his diagrams.

  He wanted to move her into the Women’s Camp but she begged him to let her finish the wall.

  ‘The wall?’ he asked and frowned behind his glasses. ‘There will be other walls. One day you’ll move anyway.’

  He didn’t know about her dealings with the seamstress and let her stay in the Family Camp.

  The children under the age of ten lived with their mothers on the women’s bunks. In the morning they came to the Block where they played, attended the clandestine lessons, had their meals and returned to their sleeping quarters late in the afternoon. There were boys who worked, like Adam Landau for the Camp Capo, as runners for a Block Senior, for the Registrar, or as apprentices with craftsmen where they got better food.

  The kitchen helpers had a tame raven, which they taught to speak three words. The bird sat on their shoulder and picked their ear until they fed it a piece of potato or a crumb of stale bread. The orderlies had a privileged position; they were better dressed and supported their families with bits of food they stole from their masters. Yet even the runners and the apprentices came to the Children’s Block for company and a game of marbles.

  It was only by chance that Alex Ehren learned about the source of Adam’s golden bead. One day a Polish Capo accosted him in front of the Children’s Block. He had never seen the man before and was surprised when he poked his shoulder with his cane.

  ‘Where is the runner?’ He looked at the children and frowned. ‘The Camp Capo’s boy. Find the brat. Move, man, move.’

  Adam hadn’t been on the Block for several days and he wondered why the man needed the child.

  ‘I’ve made a deal,’ he said and winked. ‘Agnes is the name.’ He looked at Alex Ehren and narrowed his eyes. ‘The little one is her go-between.’

  It took Alex Ehren a while to grasp Adam Landau’s part in the deal and he was horrified by its implication.

  Half the inmates in the Czech Family Camp were women. They were starved, dressed in rags and often infested with vermin that bred in the dampness. Yet some of them, like flowers in a swamp, kept their beauty, poise and femininity even in the nether world of Birkenau. They were different from the Gypsies because they were considered well bred and their heads were not shaven. There were men in the Family Camp – their husbands, friends and former lovers – but they were not intent on their wives’ bodies but rather on the midday soup, which was a watershed between life and death.

  Yet the privileged – those who stole from the prisoners’ food, those who dressed in warm jackets and boots and were not hungry for bread – lusted for women. The camp was a terrible place, a desert and a wilderness, lost and forsaken. It was life at its starkest and most basic, a world almost reptilian in its cruelty and struggle for survival. An intimate meeting with a woman was the memory of a lost home, of a wife and family.

  For a woman to find a rich lover was a turn of good luck. Some of the concubines were made Block Seniors or Registrars and escaped the cold, the hunger and the slave labour outside the barracks. Adam Landau was an ideal go-between because as a child he could visit the Women’s Block and arrange a meeting at the Camp Capo’s cubicle. At first Alex Ehren was taken aback by the boy’s corruption and he spoke about it with Marta Felix. She was the oldest among the women instructors, an intellectual and a confidante.

  ‘We are hungry and have nothing to sell. The only thing a woman can offer is her body. If she finds anybody who wants to buy. Yes,’ she said, ‘some women use their children as go-betweens. You cannot cross a river and remain dry. Good and bad are relative matters. What is important is to stay alive, because once you are dead nothing matters any more.’

  ‘It’s immoral.’

  ‘Is it? Should Agnes wait until her belly caves in and her legs turn into sticks and her breasts wither away like dry leaves? Moral? What is moral? To die and be thrown behind the block?’

  ‘Majda will find out. Maybe she knows already. What will she think about her mother?’

  ‘She will understand. Or she won’t. What matters is life. Morality comes later.’

  ‘And … you?’ He was embarrassed to ask.

  ‘No, I don’t sleep with anybody,’ she said. She held out her hand to touch his. ‘Not because I am so chaste or moral but because nobody has asked me.’ She paused and looked at the pained face of the young man. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘you think of Lisa Pomnenka and about love. She may be as much in love with you as you are with her. But don’t be a fool; if there is a choice between love and life, she’ll choose life.’

  He was angry, and he recoiled from Marta whom he now felt was coarse, cold and unfeeling.

  Twice a week the children visited the old and the ill. The older children went one by one but Majda and Eva went together because it was easier to manage in pairs. They took the old woman’s bowl and washed it under the tap, turned over her mattress and even dragged her for a walk around the block. And when they returned they spoke of their visit, because even those whose life seemed worthless had a story to tell. Some of the dying had been important, famous or rich, or had lived a thrilling life. Sometimes when Alex Ehren heard a name, he remembered that the person had written a book or had been an actor or musician, and he was surprised at his present wretchedness. It often happened that on their next visit the children found an empty bunk, because the old person had died during the night, but they had grown accustomed to death and weren’t particularly alarmed. Alex Ehren made them draw pictures of the old people, because he felt that what was brought to the surface wouldn’t turn into nightmares in their sleep. He kept the children busy with their small, daily matters – a game, a story and their weekly competition – to shield them from the dragons of fear. They were scared of separation, of pain and of transports to a new camp, but his wards who were still very young weren’t afraid of death and spoke without terror about the old people who had died.

  When Neugeboren turned eight each of the children gave up a slice of their evening bread ration, which the girls spread with beetroot jam and stacked like a cake. They lifted Neugeboren on a chair, once for each year and one more time for the next. Alex Ehren had a bit of foil from the captain’s hat and they made the boy a tinsel crown and let him eat half of the cake. Aunt Miriam added a handful of sweets from the undelivered parcels and in the afternoon they sang birthday songs and played games. Himmelblau came around and shook hands with the boy and then his matron and the other teachers came over and all said something funny or encouraging to Neugeboren, the boy who had smuggled to Fredy his last bowl of pudding.

  ‘Next year,’ Beran promised, ‘you’ll do natural history.’

  Neugeboren was too young to join Beran’s group, where the children learned about animals and plants which they had never seen. He was curious and restless and always out for adventure. He had been Man Friday in the play and Fabian spoke to him in his best satanic voice rolling his r’s and hissing his s’s
.

  ‘Many happy returns, my little brother. We actors have to stick together.’

  The games, competitions and birthday parties were modest and simple. They were like pebbles in a brook or grass along a path, scarce and unpretentious. In a different place or at another time they would have carried weight. Yet here their sing-alongs, their weekly performances and even the visits to the old people, made them look forward to the next day. Their reading and writing and the school routine were not only what they were on the surface, but a safeguard against perdition too.

  The children spoke about the days and months to come as if the Family Camp and the Children’s Block were to last forever … as if it was a solid base on which they could build their lives. Next year, thought Bubenik, I’ll be in Fabian’s class or take up carving lessons with Shashek, and Aryeh, who was in the senior group, hoped that Himmelblau would let him teach Hebrew when the school year was over. Even the instructors spoke about next year, not only for the children’s sake but also for their own; without hope and pretence they wouldn’t have been able to live.

  The raven, which the cooks kept as a pet, was the only bird in the camp. The blackbirds, the starlings and even the common sparrows had died on the electrified fence and the skies above the blocks were empty and barren. It was queer and unnatural to live in a world without birds, and Lisa Pomnenka painted their winged shadows on her sky. She also painted them into the crowns of the birches and the birds perched there, blue, yellow and red-breasted, and the children pointed at them and learned their names. They were not real birds, just as the meadow was not real but only an imaginary stretch of grass, but the illusion and the make-believe kept them above water.

  Some of the children became corrupted like Adam, who turned into a pimp, others, like Majda, wet their beds and sucked their thumbs, and others cheated at marbles and lied to get another shirt. They were imperfect like the lopsided trees and the fake flowers and the malformed blackbirds on the wall. The Block was only a substitute for life and Alex Ehren and Fabian were poor, mediocre teachers. Nor was Lisa Pomnenka an accomplished artist, but they did what had to be done because there was nobody else to do their task better. The Block was like a leaking boat, in constant danger of sinking. And yet it sailed on, limping and keeling to one side, but as long as it stayed afloat the children felt safe and at home.