The Children’s Block

by Otto B Kraus

  It was true that Julius Abeles didn’t believe in the uprising. He ridiculed the communist underground, Felsen and the seamstress, with whom he had a running feud because he refused to pay up into the weapon fund.

  ‘The camp is more important than your profit. Only together have we got a chance.’

  ‘It’s dog eat dog here. Each for himself and no party or underground movement will help me if my number is up.’

  He was ready to take his share of danger and carry forbidden stuff under a cargo of beetroot, but he was greedy and never parted with the small hoard of valuables he had stowed away.

  ‘What nonsense,’ he said to Alex Ehren, ‘to fight the Germans with sticks and spoons. They will shoot us all.’

  ‘What else can we do?’

  ‘There are ways.’ He looked around cautiously. ‘The war can’t last forever and there is a price for everything. Even from the September transport some survived. And who survived? Those who could pay. Do you think the SS physician saved the doctors and the apothecary for nothing?’

  He was all set on buying and selling, and judged the world accordingly. Once or twice he had dealings with a German, an SS guard of Czech origin, for whom he procured a watch from a Kanada worker and another time a pair of leather boots. Yet he preferred to trade with prisoners, with the Block Seniors and cooks but also with ordinary inmates on his barracks. There was a great deal of envy among the people, who purchased from him a pinch of tobacco, a needle and thread, or leased a pencil stub for two spoons of soup; some prisoners hated the dealer who sold them tobacco on credit and for the next three days cashed the debt from their meagre bread ration.

  One night there was a commotion among the bunks. During curfew hours the inmates relieved themselves into tin containers at the rear end of the barracks where the Block Services deposited the bodies of those who had died during the night. It was a murky place, smelling of death, spilled urine and excrement, forbidding and horrible.

  ‘What is it?’ exclaimed Julius Abeles, when the men closed in around him. ‘No, I am not your man. I buy and sell but, no, I’ve sold no information.’

  There were more men at the rear now. Alex Ehren saw the dark shapes of prisoners who climbed down from the bunks and joined the growing crowd. The ring swelled until there were a hundred men, some not knowing what the commotion was about, though others rushed forward with violent intent. He listened to the hum, angry and ominous like the roar of a waterfall, and Julius’s pitched protestations.

  ‘Why should I squeal?’ he cried out. ‘What good would it do me? Am I a Block Senior or a Capo? If there is a traitor among us, you will have to look for him somewhere else. Leave me alone; I am not the rat you want.’

  There was no evidence against Julius Abeles. The prisoners who were taken for interrogation by the Gestapo, returned beaten and bruised, but none of them had been punished or put in solitary confinement. The Germans certainly didn’t know about the mutiny because they hadn’t touched Felsen or the seamstress, nor did they conduct a search at the place where the contraband material was concealed. It was a false accusation, either random or spread on purpose by his enemy.

  Alex Ehren felt that he should climb down and defend the man, but he was scared of the angry multitude and didn’t budge. He justified his cowardice by his responsibility for the children whom he couldn’t leave. There were the adolescent boys who worked on the Children’s Block but at night stayed with male inmates. The younger boys slept with their mothers on the Women’s Block, but the orphans, even the very small ones, were on the Men’s Block close to their teachers. The boys on the pallet opposite woke and lifted their heads.

  ‘What is it?’ Neugeboren was about to get down and see for himself, but Alex Ehren didn’t let him because at the rear a terrible thing was happening.

  ‘Death to informers. Go into the wires,’ shouted a man and beat Julius Abeles about his head. ‘Death to traitors. Into the wires.’ The voices were like an echo that rose and grew and multiplied.

  ‘I am no informer. You have no right!’ lisped Julius Abeles over his broken tooth. ‘I’ve done nothing. Check it out. I swear it’s a mistake.’

  He started out confidently, loudly, but his lisping voice weakened and fell until it became a shadow of a sound.

  There was no reason and no pity in the crowd, and they beat the scrawny man with their fists and with their wooden clogs, which they took off their feet. They weren’t men with names any more, but just an angry mass of bodies, hungry and scared and on the verge of death. They were frightened and desperate, and like dogs in a pack, ready to tear at anything. They didn’t know what or whom he might have betrayed; they had no idea what the accusation was and yet they wanted him dead. Most of the men didn’t know about Felsen and the triads or the kerosene bottles at the Clothes Storeroom. They hated him not for what he had done but because they ached to vent their own anger and frustration and fear. They fell on Julius Abeles with their clenched fists, their teeth bared, blindly, ferociously, they hit him on his head, on his back … everywhere.

  One of the men opened the back door and they pushed him towards the crack.

  ‘I’ll pay!’ cried Julius Abeles in a desperate effort to save his life. ‘There is enough for everybody. I’ll get you two loaves of bread. What’s the hurry? Wait for tomorrow. When there is light you will see I am the wrong man. It’s somebody else, not me.’

  He looked into the darkness of the block for support, to those for whom he had found medicine, white bread and a piece of rag. He needed a friend to come to his rescue. There was an immense mob by now, half of the block, two hundred men perhaps, and Alex Ehren knew that he should face the crowd, cry out, defend him, but he was helpless against their fury. He was ashamed of his cowardice, but he stayed on his berth and did nothing.

  The noise at the rear abated but the fury didn’t stop. The prisoners beat Julius Abeles until he bled from his nose and mouth but the slaughter went on. There was little sound save the dull blows and the man’s stifled sobs, as if somebody had covered his mouth. The door opened wider and Alex Ehren saw Julius Abeles move into the light of the projector. He held his hands above his head and stumbled forwards, propelled by the hubbub of rage and hatred. He was outlined against the wires, small, miserable and bent with pain. The SS sentry shouted a warning. Alex Ehren heard two shots, and then like an afterthought, a third and final reverberation.

  The dead man’s bunk was empty. Then there were hands. They came from all sides, from the bunk above and from the berths underneath, greedy, grabbing, tearing and penetrating into Julius Abeles’s blanket and mattress. The darkness grew alive with fingers, wild and uncouth, pillaging the bread, the jam and the crumbled cheese that Julius had hidden under his head. There was a squish and a rustle of spilled straw, but soon even that stopped and all was silent again.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ Alex Ehren said to the boys. ‘There’s no point in staying awake. He was mad to run out of the block during curfew.’

  He knew that the boys didn’t believe him but there was nothing else he could have said.

  In the morning the Block Warden gathered the body from under the wires and laid it among the rest of the dead. He was very small and there was only a little blood on his chest and belly. Alex Ehren wondered whether anybody had found the satchel of gold and diamonds, with which Julius Abeles had hoped to bail himself out.

  Life on the Children’s Block didn’t change. There were only a few days left, certainly less than a week, and Alex Ehren ticked off his hours, his mornings and his nights. They had arrived on two trains last December, one on the 16th and the other two days later. Would it be six months after the first or the second transport’s arrival? It was immensely important to keep up the routine, the morning wash, the lessons and games and even the competitions, because each day the children were spared fear and chaos was a benefit, a victory over despair.

  For their Wednesday party Fabian found a singer who gave a performance of popular songs and arias. The
camp was full of artistes that had been on stage, actors, singers and musicians, who, for a piece of bread or an additional portion of soup, were ready to give a show. Yet even more important than the bit of food was the applause they reaped from the children.

  The singer, La Baum, had been famous in the pre-war days and she came to the Block in her ill-fitting coat, wooden clogs and a kerchief over her hair. However, she had managed to find lipstick, and her face was made up and her hair combed into a crown. She wasn’t young any more, and life in the camp had added a number of years to her age. Yet the moment La Baum climbed on the stage that Shashek had built on the chimney, she was transformed and young again. She wrapped a tattered shawl around her shoulders and she sang and moved in small mincing steps as if she weren’t standing on an old table but performing in front of a full house with all the lights shining on her.

  The last section of the meadow on the wall was unfinished and the bare planks stood out like an open wound. Lisa Pomnenka had painted half of a tree green and leafy but the other half was left only in a sketchy outline. There were still the ladder and her painting paraphernalia, a piece of rag, some turpentine and an apron, which she used to tie around her waist to keep her skirt clean. Shashek wouldn’t move the ladder or the pot of paint, and kept it where the girl had stopped working.

  ‘She may come back,’ he repeated with his face folded into an involuntary grin. ‘She wouldn’t leave half a tree unfinished.’

  Since she was gone the children had no handicraft lessons, but the Dutch girl was good with her hands and she could, at least for a day or two, keep the girls occupied with paper folding and with their little pictures of trees, houses and animals they had never seen.

  Each time Alex Ehren looked at the make-believe landscape, the trompe l’oeil meadow, the copse, the birds and the wooden railing with the geranium pots, he remembered the girl. He ached for her proximity, for the touch of her skin, her fragrance and her sudden, birdlike turn of head, but he didn’t grieve. She might be dead, or now live in another compound, but he had no power to change anything. He would probably never learn what happened to her and he had to make peace with his helplessness. It was as if his own fear had made him numb and impervious even to his feeling of loss. There was no sense in regret, he thought, because she might be better off where she was now than if she had stayed with the death-bound December contingent. His work carried him through the 16th, the 17th and the 18th of June. Even on the 20th, which would have been the day of their execution, nothing unusual happened – save for one thing, which, as they initially believed, might be a good omen.

  In mid-morning a green military car drove up to the Registrar’s office. Soon afterwards the three members of the Edelstein family, Miriam, her mother and the boy were summoned to the camp gate. The boy Aryeh heard the summons and he walked out on the camp road. There could be only one reason why the family was called to the Registrar’s office.

  He stood on the road where the labourers chipped stones and built them into a hard surface.

  ‘I’m going to see Edelstein,’ he said and his thin face was bright with a smile.

  It is a good omen, thought Alex Ehren, who had feared the day for three months. We are alive and there is no sign of danger, no preparations, no curfew and no SS sentries with dogs. The boy is going to meet his father and things might look up. Edelstein’s name carried a certain magic because back in the ghetto the Eldest had a way with the Germans. He used to haggle with the SS commanders about the number of transports and to intercede for the life of prisoners who were caught with contraband cigarettes or with a letter smuggled by a friend through the ghetto catacombs.

  It was he who coaxed the authorities to establish children’s homes, to allow them a playground on the bastion and increase their food rations. The visit might be a good turn because if they were to be put to death why should Edelstein be allowed to see his family?

  The boy waited in front of the Hospital Block and then they went, the boy, his grandmother and his mother on a stretcher, down the camp road. And as they passed the dark barracks, the deportees looked up from their stones and there was a glint of hope in their eyes.

  ‘There might be a change of plans,’ said Felsen, who was in touch with the underground organisation.

  Even Fabian woke up from his gloominess and watched the procession.

  ‘Who knows, the Germans might grant us another six months.’

  In the meantime, the group reached the green car at the end of the road.

  ‘One sick prisoner,’ announced the Hospital Senior with his arms at his sides. The officer nodded and looked at Aunt Miriam.

  ‘Get up and walk. Two steps won’t kill you.’ He lit another cigarette and sat next to the driver.

  A day later they learned of Edelstein’s death. A Polish convict came to the Children’s Block and told them. The SS officer had brought Aryeh, Aunt Miriam and her mother to the penal block in the Main Camp.

  ‘You asked to see your family,’ said Hessler, the SS officer. ‘Here they are.’

  He drew his revolver and shot the boy in the head, then his mother and then the old woman. At the end he shot Edelstein. None of them cried.

  In the evening they gathered at the rear of the Block – the instructors and matrons, the adolescent youth assistants and the school children – and said Kaddish for Edelstein. For most of them it was the first time they said Kaddish because although there were many deaths, there were no funerals. Most of the children came from non-observant assimilated families and had little knowledge of religious matters. They were like Hynek Rind, who believed he was Czech, or Felsen the communist or Marta Felix, who didn’t believe in God.

  ‘How can you believe—’ she shook her head ‘—even those who had faith must have lost it.’

  ‘It is a matter of acceptance,’ Dezo Kovac said, as if he were speaking to himself. ‘God has little to do with religion. He doesn’t need us. We need him.’

  The children didn’t understand the Aramaic in which Dezo Kovac recited the prayer. He translated the words and wrote them on scraps of paper and the children could read them in their language, in Czech, German or Dutch.

  ‘Yisgadal ve yiskadash,’ recited Dezo Kovac, facing Lisa Pomnenka’s painted wall, which was the direction of Jerusalem. ‘Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honoured, adorned and lauded be the Name of the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world, and say Amen.’

  Alex Ehren didn’t want to praise God for death or for the misery and squalor and fear they had to suffer. He was reluctant to trust in a God that was indifferent to their death and who had no pity on Neugeboren and Majda and Bubenik and the rest of the children, who by now had learned to read whole words.

  Edelstein, Aunt Miriam, her mother, and the boy Aryeh were irrevocably dead, and he was unable to acquiesce to the void of non-being, theirs, his or anybody’s. Did they die in vain like the many thousands that arrived in Birkenau every day? Or were they perhaps executed as a symbol and sacrifice, which would allow the rest of the inmates in the Family Camp to live? Were they all – he and the ten thousand other prisoners – a burnt offering that would perhaps, somewhere in the future, serve a purpose? Or was the universe nothing but a matter of random, an absurdity, a maelstrom of accidental particles? He didn’t know. He rebelled against a God whom he was unable to understand and whose justice was different from human experience. He didn’t want to become resigned, to accept and make peace with his mortality and yet he said with all the others, ‘Va yomar Amen’, and say Amen.

  They stood with their faces towards the make-believe meadow, the flowers and the flying birds, which was also the direction of Jerusalem. They repeated the Aramaic invocation composed at the time of the destruction of the Temple. It was a prayer that made peace with death and which had been recited for every dead Jew for two thousand years. It was terrible, thought Alex Ehren, that the first Jewish prayer his ch
ildren ever heard was a prayer for the dead. Yet at the same time it was as if they had returned home to what they had always been, without the lie and pretence that they were what they were not.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Himmelblau, ‘it is permitted to say Kaddish de Rosh Galut, a Kaddish for a teacher or the Head of the Exiled. I don’t know,’ he went on in his poor Czech, ‘whether Edelstein was a great teacher but he certainly was the Ghetto Eldest for almost three years. I think—’ he looked at the teachers, the matrons and the children ‘—we may consider him a Head of the Exiled.’

  ‘We pray for the Ghetto Eldest Jakob Edelstein and for all the House of Israel,’ chanted Dezo Kovac, and the children repeated the words in Czech and some in German. ‘We pray for our teachers and their disciples and the disciples of their disciples, and for all that study the law here and elsewhere. May heaven send abundant peace and life to us and to all Israel, and I say Amen.’

  And he tore away a shred of his tattered shirt and scattered a pinch of ashes on his head.

  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.