by Sam Pivnik
The next room was another clothing store. This one served to continue the essential anonymity of the camp. A trusty threw me a bundle of clothes and told me to put them on. Everything was striped – a shirt, a jacket, a pair of trousers, a cap. There was no underwear and the pair of wooden clogs was several sizes too big. In fact, nothing fitted at all and the cloth was rough and coarse, smelling disgusting. It was the ultimate in hand-me-downs. I didn’t know it at the time but I was wearing a dead man’s clothes. There was no belt. After all, we might use this to hang ourselves, so just to move about I had to hold my trousers up with one or two hands, depending on the circumstances.
It was well and truly dark by the time this whole induction was over and perhaps two hundred of us were lined up, in rows of five, to be marched into the camp proper. The SS were back in the equation now, leading us, along with the trusties, through a corridor of barbed wire through compounds of low wooden huts. We trudged for perhaps 300 metres, then came to a gate guarded by SS men. It was dragged open and through we went, our clogs clattering in the gathering dusk on a rough, stony track past yet more compounds surrounded by wire and electrified fences. Now we were speeded up. The march turned into a run and the shouts and the thuds of the trusties’ clubs were the music of our advance. Two hundred metres more and we were at another gate. This was opened for us too and we were hurried past a long row of stable-like huts until they halted us outside one of them. Number 10 was painted neatly on the door. We would soon learn this was Block IIa, the Quarantine Block.
A trusty stood on the step in front of us. He wore a yellow armband with the letters KAPO in black stencilled on it and he called us to order. It wasn’t the nicest welcome I’ve ever had. He called us fucking Jew scum and told us there was to be no talking. We were to get into bunks and sleep five to a bunk and that should keep us warm enough. We would get food and bedding in the morning, he told us. Then he ordered us to stay quiet and stay put. He paused so that what he had to say next had maximum effect, ‘Cause any trouble and you’re as good as dead.’
That did the trick. No one spoke as we went into the near-darkness of Block 10. I squeezed in alongside four others, strangers. I’d never slept anywhere before other than with my family. Even on holiday in the Garden of Eden, we had all been together. Nobody undressed or even took off their clogs. My arm, my groin and my head stung with the treatment I’d received. My stomach growled and hurt – I hadn’t eaten for three days and the only drink I’d had was my own sugared piss. The bunks were dusty and rickety, every slight movement causing the timber to creak and groan on the uneven earth floor. I wanted to cry myself to sleep but I was too scared even to do that. Instead, I lay in the darkness, listening to the breathing and snoring of the others, shaking uncontrollably.
Nothing could have prepared me for what happened during that long, dreadful night. I felt a rhythmic rubbing from behind and half turned to see a face leering in the darkness. He was a man in his forties who I remembered from the Kamionka. I didn’t know his name and had never spoken to him and here he was, taking advantage of this bizarre night to bugger me. I couldn’t believe that anyone could think of this after all we’d been through, but he clearly had other ideas and I felt my arse suddenly wet. I daren’t cry out, for fear of the Kapo’s club or a bullet from the SS.
I closed my eyes and all night long the words of the tattooing trusty came tumbling into my head: ‘Your family … they’re already in Heaven…’
6
The Razor’s Edge
That night felt like the longest of my life. Did I sleep at all? I don’t think so. Sleep was a luxury in the camps. We didn’t dream; only free people do that. I lay there, listening to the groaning, sobbing and praying. Did I hear the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead? I was too busy praying there’d be no more attention from the man who had abused me, but he lay like the dead too. The smell was awful. For all it was a hot August, the place was rank with mildew as well as the stench of bodies that had been trapped for too long in the ghettoes. The older men were whispering, words I couldn’t catch. But I had no one to talk to and I daren’t ask questions because I wasn’t sure I could bear the answers.
It was probably dawn when the door of Block Ten crashed back and the warm sun streamed in, illuminating the dust in the air. A trusty blocked out the sun for a moment. I could see he was wearing a cap and had a jacket over his striped uniform. The orders were in German and the accent, I learned later, was Hamburg. He ordered us to get of our fucking beds and called us lazy bastards. We had to get out and move ourselves.
I all but fell out of my top bunk and the next thing I felt was a clenched fist to the side of my head. I jolted backwards, my vision blurred and crackling. Then I felt a boot up my backside; a trusty was telling me to get a fucking move on.
He crossed back to the door. He’d probably cuffed a few of the others, but I thought then that he’d singled me out. He bellowed at us to get lined up. We stumbled into the open air, glad to breathe it in after the congestion of the night. I suppose there were forty or fifty of us, standing in a ragged line outside our hut and the one next door. I would later learn to avoid eye contact with anybody, keep my head down and do as I was told, but this was my first day in whatever camp this was and I was still too shocked not to react to what was happening around me.
The trusty with the handy fist and boot was walking along the line counting us and he called across to another man holding a ledger. The Teutonic obsession with counting and record-keeping – we’d seen it in Bedzin, before the ghetto and after it, but here it ran riot, a bureaucrat’s paradise.
There was a weird silence. Thinking back, the whole of the previous day had been noise – the screamed orders of the SS, the barking dogs, even the psalms on the rattling train and the moans in the block-house. Now you could have heard a pin drop.
‘You filthy fucking Jew bastard!’ There it was again, the heavy Hamburg accent. I heard his boots crunch on the ground and saw him cross to a man a few places down the line from me. He wasn’t much older than I was, but looked deathly pale under the brown scars of his haircut. I saw the trusty swing up his club and bring it down with a sickening crunch on the pale prisoner’s head. He sank to his knees with an incoherent grunting, his arms flailing uselessly above his head as he tried to ease his pain.
‘You filthy, dirty bastard. You’ve shit yourself.’
The trusty’s face said it all. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing – and smelling. He brought the club down again, if anything harder this time. And again. Each time the cudgel struck home, there was a cracking of bone and spurts of blood arced through the air. I couldn’t look but I couldn’t look away. The prisoner pitched forward, flat on his face, and I hoped that was that. It wasn’t. The trusty paused, took a couple of steps back and then kicked the head of the man he’d just poleaxed. There was another crunch, like sticks being broken. I could see his bloody teeth on the ground at the opposite end from the pool of liquid shit.
I looked at the trusty. There was no emotion in his face, no pleasure, no pride. And certainly no regret. An SS man was walking in our direction and I felt sure he’d intervene, take the man’s club away, bawl him out and get the injured man to a hospital. But he just glanced vaguely in our direction and walked on.
The trusty was still calling his victim a fucking dirty pig and was still aiming kicks at the fallen man’s head, neck, body. It didn’t matter to him where those boots landed and by that time I don’t suppose it mattered to the prisoner either. His whole head was a mess of blood and he didn’t seem to be breathing.
Aerial photograph of Auschwitz-Birkenau, 13 September 1944. My family and I arrived at Birkenau before the railway lines were extended through the main gate. I was then separated from my family and, after being shaved and tattooed, placed into block 10 which was in the quarantine area.
The trusty stood in front of us now, hands on his hips, club smeared with blood and brains and told us our futures, such as they were.
In this block, he told us, we had to stay clean. He added, of course, that we were fucking Yids. He paused, his hard eyes scanning our lines, learning our faces, watching for signs of fight or disobedience. ‘Listen to me,’ he said, probably the most unnecessary three words I’ve ever heard, because listening was exactly what we were all doing. He told us his name was Rudi and that he was the Blockältester, the Block Senior. We were to do what he told us straight away or we’d get what the prisoner had got. He then asked, for good measure, if we understood.
* * *
Yes, there was a lot to understand. A lot to learn. If you didn’t, you died. This was Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most deadly extermination camp the Nazis could devise. And no birds sang here. It had grown, I learned in the weeks ahead, from a small concentration camp – Auschwitz I – adapted from a Polish army barracks. As the decisions from Berlin on Jewish policy became ever more insane, its status changed. It became a killing camp and the methods used required larger premises, to house the prisoners like us and to provide the gas chambers and their attendant crematoria. If you read about the Holocaust today, you’ll read about the creators of it – Adolf Hitler himself; Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS with his racial obsessions; Reinhard Heydrich, ‘the blond beast’ who was his Number Two; Rudolf Höss, our own commandant at KL Auschwitz-Birkenau. I never met these men, never saw them, not even Höss as far as I can remember. For me, the creators of the Holocaust were Rudi and all the other Blockältestes and Kapos like him. They were a breed apart.
At Auschwitz the SS ran the place, a job specifically given to the Totenkopf, Death’s Head units, at the outbreak of war. They made the overall decisions and held ultimate power but the day-to-day business was handled by the Lagerälteste, the camp seniors; Blockälteste like Rudi; Stubendienst, the barrack orderlies, and Kapos, more or less foremen or overseers of the barracks. There were Lagerschreiber and Blockschreiber who kept written records. Many of these men had been drafted in when the camp had opened three years earlier, several hundred of them from other concentration camps, to act as heavies and strong-arm men. They were habitual criminals, hardened thugs the Third Reich could use to good effect and they wore green triangles on their uniforms – Rudi was one of these. These Berufsverbrecher, professional criminals, worked hand in glove with the SS.
Men who wore black triangles were the Asos, the antisocial ones. It struck me as ironic that this term could be better applied to the BVs in their atrocious treatment of us. This was a very wide group, alcoholics, degenerates and the long-term unemployed; people that nice Germans didn’t want cluttering up their streets.
The red triangle denoted a political prisoner. In the prison record, they are called Schutzhäftlinge, protective prisoners. Most of them were Polish Gentiles, there because they’d joined partisan groups against the Reich or been rounded up in various Aktions. A few were ethnic Germans, who had been members of opposition groups to the Nazis before the war.
At the bottom of the heap in terms of discipline were the Kapos, with their distinctive arm badges. Many of these men were Jews, mostly from Germany or Western Europe, and they were recruited from the long-term prisoners. One thing they all had in common was their viciousness. Our education from them consisted of blows and harder blows if we moved too slowly or got something wrong. Most of them were just creatures of the SS, anxious to prove how useful they were to the regime. In Auschwitz, as in all concentration camps, the natural order of things was reversed. In the unnatural, topsy-turvy world of genocide, the riff-raff were in charge; the lunatics were running the asylum.
I didn’t know any of this that morning as I watched a man being beaten to death because he had dysentery. It was 7 August 1943. Five years ago I’d have been splashing through the river in the Garden of Eden with my family. But I could not think of my family now. And yet I could think of nothing else.
‘Please sir…’ There was a hand in the air, a prisoner asking a question. That was as far as he got. Rudi’s club thudded across his face.
The Blockältester told him that he didn’t need to fucking talk and called him scum. We were going to the shitters to empty our bowels and get washed. We were not to fucking hang around and we were to make sure we were fucking cleaned up. And we had to follow him.
Rudi was strong. He had good quality boots with studs and a belt to hold his trousers up. He got better food than nearly everybody else and this was my fourth day with no food at all. We did our best, shuffling after him in loose, ill-gripping clogs and holding our trousers up at the waist. The rough wood was cutting my feet – I’d said goodbye to my socks the day before but the last thing I thought of was slowing down to rub the chafing. Rudi yelled that he’d told us to get a move on, as he jogged alongside us, swinging his club. It was the merest chance who he hit and he’d change sides so most of us got a taste of his club and his temper. The crack as the wood met bone was palpable and anybody who went down was kicked until he got up or couldn’t move at all.
The camp latrine was a work of art. It was a long hut, not unlike Block Ten we’d just left. What light there was came through small windows in the roof space and between the uprights that supported the roof were long cement slabs with holes in them. I’d never seen anything like it. Even in the Kamionka we had our own toilet that only the Pivniks used. Here there was no privacy at all. On Rudi’s command we all dropped our trousers and jostled each other for one of the holes. They were choked with shit and the smell was revolting. Everything just dropped down into a trench under the slab and there was no toilet paper or anything else to clean yourself with. Since I hadn’t eaten for days, nothing came out, so I hauled up my trousers again and waited.
Then Rudi hustled us into the Wash Barrack next door. Again it was a hut, again badly lit. There were troughs full of dirty, cold water that made the warm showers of yesterday seem like heaven. Rudi shouted that we were to wash ourselves or he’d beat the shit out of us instead. And again, he felt he had to ask us if we understood.
No doubt this was Rudi’s idea of fatherly concern – making sure we understood what was expected of us. There was no soap, no towel, just the water. I rubbed it over my face, hands and body.
Rudi roared at us to get back outside and on to Block Ten. The pace was exhausting, which of course was what it was intended to be. The gruelling runs, the vicious beatings, the casual violence, was supposed to break us. I would soon learn that this Quarantine Block was actually for the purposes of going through an initiation, a test of physical and mental stamina to see what we were made of.
The irony was that we were just flesh and blood, but nobody was interested in that. The last in line outside got more thumps and kicks from the Blockältester and the run back started. It followed exactly the same pattern as before but when we got back to our hut there were two Kapos there in their yellow armbands. They were standing by a pile of hessian sacks and a pile of dirty straw. There was also a large trestle table with bread on it and a bucket of black, steaming liquid.
Blockälteste Rudi was still in charge. He told us to take a sack and stuff it with straw. That was our bedding. We stood in line, watching what the man ahead was doing, avoiding anything that led to a clip from Rudi or the Kapos. I caught my sack, rough and smelling of stables. I scooped up armfuls of straw and knelt there, stuffing the sack before disappearing into Block Ten to find my bunk and put it there. I briefly remembered my attacker of the night before, but there was no sign of him. Then it was out into the sunshine again, to the accompanying rhythm of Rudi’s barked orders. Again in line, standing as straight as we could and staring at the food. As we marched past the table, a Kapo gave me a chipped enamel bowl, a slice of hard, stale bread about four centimetres thick, a slice of salami perhaps half a centimetre thick and a sliver of margarine. I had no idea then that the rest of the rations, along with milk and sugar, had long been hived off by the Kapos who worked the kitchens. What was left wouldn’t have kept a dog alive.
One of the Kapos told us to guard our bowls wi
th our lives. If we lost ours, we wouldn’t get another one. As we passed the bucket of black liquid, a Kapo slapped a ladle into my bowl. They called it coffee, but it was ersatz stuff made from roasted barley and it tasted bitter and burnt. The SS wouldn’t have touched it. Rudi ordered us inside to eat. I hadn’t realised until I drank the coffee how cracked and dry my lips were. My tongue was swollen and furred with the lack of liquid but the coffee helped and I was able to chew. God knows what kind of bread this was or what was in the sausage, but it was literally a life-saver to me then. It was gone in seconds. I was still a growing boy at sixteen and wasn’t likely to grow much more if this was the meagre amount we were going to get.
I was still wondering when the next meal would come when we were ordered outside again, lined up in fives. I looked furtively around the lines. Almost everybody was older and bigger than me and I thanked whatever God I still believed in that my mother had pushed me into that line back on the platform and that nobody – yet – had winkled me out.
There was a Kapo in front of us who asked whether any of us were tailors. No one moved. He asked whether any of us could sew. He clearly wasn’t looking for much in the way of expertise. A hundred thoughts flashed through my brain. My father was a tailor, so was my uncle. I could handle a needle and thread and could probably pick up working a treadle machine fairly quickly. But this, I already knew, was Auschwitz-Birkenau. They killed people here. A few hands rose timidly. Mine didn’t.
