Leszek then sent Max and Jacob out to clear and process two more trains, and fueled by the desperately needed calories, Jacob was ready to go.
The work was exhausting but not noteworthy. Far more interesting to Jacob was the discussion he and Max had when they got back to Canada and were free once again to converse without fear of reprisal by the guards. Here in Canada the guards’ task wasn’t to prohibit conversation but to prevent theft. Jacob wondered whether they knew Leszek was stealing bread and cheese and juice and jam. Maybe they had a deal. Maybe Leszek did it when their backs were turned. Maybe Max actually lifted the items or pocketed them in the train cars when no one was looking. Then again, Jacob thought, perhaps it was better he didn’t know. He certainly wasn’t going to ask. The less he knew, the better—especially if the food kept coming.
The conversation between Jacob and Max was really more of a soliloquy by Max, but Jacob found it all fascinating, and it made the time go by faster. Max talked about growing up in Bucharest and the girls who had caught his eye and the pranks he used to play on the girls he liked when they were going through their bat mitzvah preparations. He talked about the raging debates he and his friends used to have over whether Jews should emigrate to Palestine and lay the groundwork for the rebirth of the state of Israel. One of Max’s friends had become obsessed with Zionism and the belief that Jews must move to Jerusalem and prepare the way for the coming Messiah. Max declared himself to be “one thousand percent” opposed to Zionism because, according to his father, only the Messiah could reestablish the Jewish state and bring all the Jews back to the Promised Land and establish peace on earth. Any human efforts to accomplish the Messiah’s work were blasphemy. But Max’s friend’s family could not be dissuaded, and finally they sold everything they had and headed for the port of Jaffa, and six months later to the day, Max’s family—and all the Jews in his section of Bucharest—had been rounded up and sent to the camps.
Jacob had never encountered debates like these, much less engaged in any. He’d heard of people moving to Palestine, of course. But he’d never heard of debates over whether Israel had to be rebuilt for the Messiah to come, or whether the Messiah had to come first and rebuild the nation of Israel. He’d never studied the prophecies from the Tanakh about the future of the Jews. No one he knew talked about such things—not even his own rabbi—and now Jacob wondered why.
While the cleaning and processing of the first train was uneventful and almost routine, if such a term could be used for something Jacob had done so few times, the handling of the second train was devastating. This time, for the first time since he had arrived, Jacob saw dozens of children step out of the cars, some of them no more than five or six or seven years old. The children weren’t there by themselves, of course. They were holding the hands of their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers, their grandparents. But their presence caught Jacob off guard.
The little girls caught his eye first, in their ponytails and print dresses with little yellow Stars of David on them, holding dolls and clinging to the skirts of their mothers, some of whom were holding real babies in their hands.
Children? Babies? Had the Nazis really brought them to Auschwitz? Why? Jacob wondered. Since arriving, he hadn’t seen any children wandering the streets or working the fields. Indeed, he couldn’t remember seeing anyone under the age of sixteen or seventeen in the camp. He certainly hadn’t seen any babies or toddlers. Where would they go?
With Fat Louie shouting obscenities at them, Jacob watched the newcomers form into the single-file lines. One by one the girls were sent to the left, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes without. The little boys were sent to the left as well. All of them. Every single one. Without exception.
Some of these precious children were brave little soldiers. Their fathers or mothers would tell them to follow the “nice men,” and they would “see them real soon,” and the kids would grimace but nod and shuffle off around the corner as though they were going to the first day of kindergarten.
Others had to be torn away from their parents, especially from their mothers, screaming and crying. More often than not, the mothers would break down weeping and plead with Hoess to let them stay with their children. And time after time, Jacob watched him say yes and send the mothers to the left as well.
Did these parents have any idea what was happening? Trembling with anger and unspeakable grief, Jacob stared at them. Some of them knew, he decided. He could see it in their eyes, in their body language that bespoke great fear and resignation and defeat. But most of them were like he had been when he arrived a few days before. They had no idea what was coming. They knew they were entering a terrible place, but they didn’t know just how terrible. How could they?
Once again, Jacob wanted to warn them all. He wanted to shout it at the top of his lungs. But whom would it save? Anyone? Would anyone live if he told them the truth? The bitter reality was no. First of all, they would likely not even hear him before the guards shot him. Second, even if they heard him, they wouldn’t have time to process what he was saying. Third, even if they did, they wouldn’t believe him. Who could believe it? His words would sound like the ravings of a madman. Fourth, of course, even if they did hear him and believe him, there was nothing they could do now. They, like him, were trapped.
As Max moved into the first cattle car, Jacob had no choice but to follow. They had a job to do, and there was no margin for error or delay. But Jacob recoiled at what he found, for there in the corner lay a dead man. His skin was a grayish green. His body had stiffened from rigor mortis.
“Come on,” Max whispered. “I’ll grab his feet. You get his hands.”
Jacob didn’t move.
“Let’s go; let’s go,” Max pushed, trying to keep his voice low. “Before we get in trouble.”
Still Jacob couldn’t do it. He had never been this close to a corpse, with the exception of his own sister, though he pushed the images of her out of his mind. This was far more grisly. This man had been dead for several days. The people on the train had apparently pushed him into the corner, covered him with hay, and sprayed him with perfumes, anything to keep away the smell. It hadn’t done much good, and Jacob fought back the urge to retch.
Now seeing in Max’s eyes the genuine fear of being caught doing nothing, Jacob finally grabbed the man’s arms. Careful to take hold of the cloth of the man’s sweater rather than the skin of his hands, Jacob helped drag the body out of the car and up onto a wooden cart. When two other prisoners from Canada wheeled the corpse away, Jacob promptly vomited all over the platform. Every extra morsel of food and every ounce of half-decent coffee Leszek was secretly giving him out of view of the guards was now out of Jacob’s system. That was bad enough, but he now had to clean that mess up too.
42
At noon a gong sounded, marking the afternoon break.
Though they had barely begun to sort and process all the luggage, everything had at least been cleared away from the train, and all the cars had been thoroughly scrubbed, disinfected, and repacked with hay. Thus, as soon as the engine was loaded with enough coal again, it would be leaving for points unknown to pick up another shipment of Jews.
“Come on,” Max said. “The guards will keep an eye on all this stuff. Let’s get some lunch.”
“I can’t,” Jacob said.
“What do you mean you can’t?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Then you haven’t been here long enough.”
“Those children,” Jacob said, but Max put up his hands.
“Don’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t think about it,” Max said.
“How can I not think about it? They’re murdering—”
But Max was more emphatic now. “I said stop.”
“I can’t stop. I have
to think about it,” Jacob said.
“You don’t have to,” Max shot back. “Are terrible things done here? Yes. Do I care? Of course I do. I’m the son of a rabbi, a child of the Book. In the middle of the night, when no one’s looking, I grieve over it all just like you do. But there’s nothing I can do about it. You can’t do anything either. So why dwell on it? Why try to make sense of it? It doesn’t make sense. It’s horrible, filthy, ugly, evil. The only way to survive is to think about something else, anything else. Don’t live in the present. Don’t dwell in the past. Dream about the future. Keep a picture of that in your head. Lock on it and never let go.”
That was it. That was the end of the conversation. Max had said all he wanted to say.
They entered the dining hall. Each was given a metal bowl filled with soup, if you could call it that. It was less than a liter of lukewarm water, some boiled cabbage, a piece of carrot, and if you were lucky, a small piece of potato. That, and a small hunk of bread and a tiny bit of margarine, was all they got.
Max ate his immediately and slurped down the “tea” they served as well.
Jacob looked at the slop, unappetizing to the point of being revolting. He looked around the room and saw the newcomers pushing it away. He also watched as any man who had been there more than a week or so not only drank his soup quickly but also gulped down any that was left behind by fools who clearly didn’t know any better.
Jacob gnawed on the bread, trying not to think about the sawdust grating his throat. He was about to push the soup away and get up when Leszek entered the hall. The kapo walked over to Jacob and, without saying a word, pointed to the soup, raised his eyebrows, and then walked away.
Jacob got the message. Leszek was saying the only people who survived were those who stayed strong, and the only ones who stayed strong were those who ate what was given to them. It wasn’t an option. It was the law of the jungle. It was an ironclad rule he must obey if he wanted to stay on the Canada detail.
So Jacob obeyed. He held his breath, drank the soup, and finished his last morsel of bread in the hopes of neutralizing the soup’s wicked aftertaste.
It didn’t work.
The moment they were finished, Max headed for the door.
Jacob moved to catch up with him, careful not to run or make any wild, sudden movements that might unnerve the guards.
“Where are you going?” he asked when he caught up with Max a moment later.
“For a walk.”
“A walk?”
“Yes, a walk,” Max said.
“Why?”
“It’s safer than a run,” Max quipped.
“But, I mean, they let you just walk around by yourself?”
“Until the gong sounds at one o’clock, yes,” Max said.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“What’s the point of giving us time to walk?”
Max didn’t respond. He just shook his head as though the answer were perfectly obvious.
It wasn’t. Not to Jacob. He didn’t press it any further, however, but rather changed the subject. “Leszek,” he said. “Where is he from?”
“A name like Leszek and you don’t know?” Max asked.
“Poland, I guess, but where?” Jacob pressed. “What city?”
“I wouldn’t ask any questions about Leszek—some things are better left alone,” Max said somewhat cryptically.
This confused Jacob too. For such a talker, why was Max so reserved when it came to anything related to Leszek? So much for showing any initiative, Jacob thought. Perhaps it was better just to keep his mouth shut. Anything he needed to know, Max would surely tell him in due time. So they kept walking for a bit, and sure enough Max soon started talking again.
“You need to be serious, Jacob,” he began.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jacob asked.
“It means you need to be serious about surviving this place,” Max continued.
“I am serious.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No, Jacob, you’re not,” Max repeated. “If you were serious, you would eat everything you see. You would drink everything except water from the showers. You eat what you can, every time, whatever they give you. Got it?”
Jacob nodded.
“I’m serious,” Max continued. “Leszek sees potential in you. I don’t know why. I ask him, ‘Why do you like Weisz so much? What’s so special about him?’ He won’t tell me. He won’t say anything about you, and he knows you won’t tell me because you don’t talk about anything. But I know he knows something about you. That’s why he chose you, and believe me, he’s very choosy. He’s building something, Jacob, something very interesting. I can’t say anything yet. He swore me to secrecy. And that’s not easy for me, as you know, because I’m the son of a rabbi. I’m a talker. But I gave Leszek my word, and that’s sacred to me. Anyway, if you keep doing your work and stay out of trouble, he will let you in on it all. I can see that. He has plans for you—for the both of us, I think. That’s why he’s paired us up. So we need to watch each other’s back. We need to take care of each other. I’ve only been here four months. But I’ve seen almost everyone in my block die. Some of dysentery. Some of starvation. Others, well, you know. They couldn’t take it anymore and ran for the fences. But for some reason Leszek spotted me, and he saw me working hard, and he saw me surviving, and he thought I had street smarts, which he said seemed surprising for a rabbi’s son. He thinks most of us yeshiva boys are too soft, and maybe he’s right. But he said he saw something in me. So in January he pulled me off the construction detail that I was on, working my tail off during the dead of winter, the most miserable conditions you can imagine. We were building a new crematorium in the blowing and drifting snow, and it was bitter cold—I mean, bitter. Only two men on my detail didn’t die. They kept replacing them, and the new guys kept dying too. But then, out of nowhere, Leszek pulled me out of there. He got me reassigned to Canada. He started to feed me, and I, well . . . I survived.”
Max suddenly became quiet. Jacob processed what his friend had said as they kept walking for a bit, past the main entrance of the camp. For the first time Jacob noticed the wrought-iron sign over the gate blocking the road coming into the camp. It read, Arbeit Macht Frei: “Work makes you free.” In a labor camp with a life expectancy between eight minutes and eight weeks, Jacob thought, the Nazi slogan wasn’t ironic; it was cruel.
“Anyway, just don’t do anything to mess this up, Jacob,” Max said, his voice more quiet and resigned than normal. “Don’t do anything stupid, and who knows? Maybe you’ll survive this place after all. Maybe we both will.”
43
It bothered Max enormously to have to work on Saturday.
Actually, bothered didn’t adequately describe it. The whole notion of working on the Sabbath enraged Max, who otherwise struck Jacob as unenrageable. For Maximilian Cohen, Nazis forcing Jews to work on Shabbat was a terrible indignity, and he fumed and cursed and grumbled all day about it. Jacob certainly got the principle behind the outrage, but he failed to see its practicality. Why did it still bother Max after being in Auschwitz for so long? How could he get so vexed about this and not about the children? There were so many other humiliations and indignities to suffer through. Was this one really so bad?
As Jacob put his head down and closed his eyes on Saturday night—in a bed he now had to share with just one other guy—he thought about how grateful he was to have met Max. It seemed this might be the start of a very interesting friendship. Yet they were so different. He doubted they would ever have been friends out in the “real world.” Of course, in the real world they never even would have met. Jacob was German; Max was Romanian. Jacob’s family was traditional but secular; Max hailed from fiercely religious Orthodox stock.
Jacob had been taught enough Hebrew to read his Torah portion at his bar mitzvah, but his rabbi had only taught him how to pronounce the funny-looking letters, not how to un
derstand what he was reading. Max, on the other hand, knew ancient Hebrew fluently. Beyond a few passages here and a few there, Jacob had never read the Torah or the Mishnah. But Max said he and his father used to sit around their home on Shabbat reading from the Law and the commentaries, dissecting and discussing and often debating the meaning of the holy text.
Max seemed to truly love studying Torah and observing Shabbat and celebrating the high holidays and embracing the community of the shul. It was everything to him. It was not only who Max was; it was who he wanted to be. Jacob, by contrast, was certainly proud to be a Jew, but he’d never fallen in love with all things Jewish. Maybe that was because his family wasn’t really religious at all. They kept kosher and went to shul and lit the candles on Shabbat, but these were traditions, not anything spiritual.
As Jacob lay awake in the darkness and stared up at the ceiling, he wondered if the evil he was now experiencing was punishment for his family’s abandoning God. Jacob could barely remember either of his parents talking about God or the Torah or the importance of prayer.
Max believed that the Jews were being punished for forgetting the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was certain that the Nazis had risen to power as a way to punish the Jewish community for abandoning the Torah and forsaking the Sabbath. Was that true? Jacob wondered. Maybe it was, but what of Max’s family? They hadn’t abandoned the Torah or forsaken Shabbat. Why were they being punished? And there were many observant Jews here in Auschwitz. Why? It didn’t make sense. Didn’t the very presence of so many religious Jews negate the validity of Max’s argument? Why would the God of Abraham be punishing faithful, religious Orthodox Jews? What in the world could they have done wrong?
Such things were beyond his province, Jacob decided. He was reminded of something his mother used to say: “My heart is not proud, nor my eyes haughty; nor do I involve myself in great matters, or in things too difficult for me.” It was a simple little proverb, but it had helped her through many challenging times. Now Jacob hoped it would help him, too.
The Auschwitz Escape Page 17
