Survivor

by Sam Pivnik

  The Kapo threw them scraps of yellow material and barked an order as the volunteers shuffled forward, telling them they would sew these on to each man’s jacket. The bits of fabric were cut into the six-sided Star of David and the colour the Gentiles had made us wear at intervals since the sixteenth century. Auschwitz might have been Hell on Earth, but there was a nod here to history, to the continuation of hate.

  The Blockältester told us that when the badge was sewn on, we were to write our number on it, nice and clear, so it was easy to read. As always, the question: ‘Understand?’

  We understood. There would be no more names at Auschwitz. No touch of humanity. I was just a Jew with a number. And if that was supposed to make me feel somehow unique, it didn’t.

  Then we were back in the Block and the Kapos had gone and the Blockältester was looking for someone else to beat to death. In the gloom of Block Ten’s interior, we started the odd furtive conversation, each of us learning the old prisoner’s trick of whispering out of the corner of the mouth. Under the scalped heads and the cuts I recognised men from Bedzin, men from the Kamionka. They weren’t friends exactly – no one had true friends in Auschwitz – but at least they weren’t total strangers either. Maybe, I thought to myself, with food in my stomach and sitting on a straw-filled sack, it won’t be so bad after all. My attacker was still nowhere in sight and I never saw him again. For weeks, maybe months, I jumped out of my skin if anyone came too close behind me but eventually I learned to forget.

  I don’t remember how long it took to sew the stars onto fifty jackets and for us to write our numbers under the star in indelible ink, but once it was done we were outside again, lined up in the usual fives.

  That was when I first saw him: the man who haunts my nightmares to this day. He was above average height, I remember, stockily built with the close-cropped hair the Aryans approved of. He was maybe mid-thirties and wore a soft side-cap, the type the SS called a schiffchen, with its eagle and skull badge. On the right collar of his grey-green Waffen-SS uniform was another skull, another symbol of death, just in case you’d missed the one on his cap, and to the left, a single star. I didn’t know it at the time but this was the rank badge of an Unterscharführer, a corporal. If he’d been a real soldier in the Wehrmacht, he’d have been an Unteroffizier, but this was the SS: they had ranks, rules and an attitude of their own. His name was Karel Kurpanik.

  It would be a while before I got the measure of the SS guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau and it’s only now, reading about it all later, that I realise the sort of men they were. Sadists and bastards – yes, that goes without saying – but it was infinitely more complex than that. Most of them were too old for front-line service and younger ones often tended to have been wounded and had been invalided out of the fighting units. A lot of them were Volksdeutsche and found themselves in a curious limbo. Even if they’d volunteered, the Wehrmacht didn’t want them because they were not Aryan. Ironically, bearing in mind how racially obsessed the SS were, they had no such qualms and took these men on for the ever-growing number of concentration and slave labour camps.

  Kurpanik was one of these. He was a Silesian from Bytom, in the Katowice area, just about as anti-Semitic and anti-Polish as it was possible to be. He had joined the Waffen-SS whose creed, I learned years later, was that each man ‘must be a fighter for fighting’s sake; he must be unquestionably obedient and become emotionally hard; he must have contempt for all racial inferiors and for those who do not belong to the Order … he must think nothing impossible.’

  Kurpanik was a natural for Auschwitz and he was posted to the guard regiment. By the time I got to the camp, he was a Rapportführer, in charge of the Quarantine Block, with its own peculiar brand of tortures; but he cut his teeth supervising an early gas chamber. If you could stand that at all, you quickly became convinced that life meant nothing.

  We stood in our fives while Kurpanik prowled the area watching the work of the Kapos and chatting occasionally to Blockältester Rudi. We were standing in a long, narrow compound, the ground dusty that August, churned by clogs and boots. By the autumn it would turn into a quagmire. One of the Kapos pointed to the far end. It must have been 400 metres away, with the concrete posts curving above the perimeter fence and the murderous barbed wire gleaming in the sun. To the one side was an open area with a road running through it and a far more solid fence, marking the perimeter. Along it were sentry posts and guard towers where helmeted men lounged alongside their machine-guns. In the first hours at Birkenau I allowed myself the luxury of looking through both rows of wire, beyond the electrification that ringed Hell, to the countryside beyond. This was part of the ‘area of interest’ as the SS called it, denuded of trees that could give shelter to escapees and dotted with single-storey storage buildings. If that was freedom, I thought, how do you get there? And how long would it be before a machine-gunner saw you? Seconds probably.

  The Kapo was pointing to two huge heaps of stones, gleaming white in the morning sun. He told us that the work was to make the ground level throughout the compound, by filling the holes with stones, so he wouldn’t fall over and break his neck. Another selection. The pointed finger. ‘You, you, you…’ I don’t know how many he counted. The chosen stepped forward and were told to take a wheelbarrow or a shovel. He ordered them to take the tools to the stores and load the barrows.

  They shambled off and visibly jumped as he yelled at them not to walk, but to run. And he was lashing out with his fists and boots, slapping men around the head and kicking their legs. If it wasn’t so grim it would have been funny – shaven-headed men in striped pyjamas, clattering on badly fitting clogs and trying to hold up their beltless trousers while at the same time carrying shovels or handling wheelbarrows. Just for the sheer bloody hell of it.

  Now the rest of us joined in. The Kapo showed us how to twist our jackets to make an improvised apron. In this we would carry the stones wherever they were needed – once again at a run, once again with the Kapo chasing us and lashing out at the stragglers. At the stone piles we waited in line while the barrows were loaded, then the shovellers dropped the stones into our aprons. We ran back, backs breaking, legs giving way, desperate not to drop our loads for fear of the beating we’d get. And all this with clogs that didn’t fit and trousers that didn’t stay up.

  As I ran backwards and forwards I realised that I was the youngest and fittest there. The older men were floundering, stones slipping, trousers falling, clogs cutting into their ankles. None of this made any sense. We’d have done the job better if they’d left us alone. It wasn’t rocket science as they say today – they’d have had a workforce capable of doing the job for days and doing it well. It eventually dawned on me that I’d missed the point. This had nothing to do with filling pot-holes or levelling ground; it had everything to do with establishing Aryan superiority and humiliating the slave labour at their disposal. They didn’t care whether we lived or died and all morning they proved this point over and over again. Clubs, boots, fists – the insane, casual brutality was yet another kind of selection.

  Some of the men who took beatings weren’t getting up. Job done as far as the Kapos and Kurpanik were concerned. I noticed that the man from Bytom was enjoying himself enormously – anybody who got a baton in the face from him wasn’t going to recover. Nobody’s wounds were being tended. If a prisoner bled to death, so what? If his cuts became infected and gangrenous, who cares? There were, after all, neat ways of coping with the problem.

  I don’t know how many hours we sweated under that summer sun. We ran backwards and forwards, slipping and staggering under the weight of the rocks. My back and arms ached. My lungs felt like broken bellows as I wheezed and gasped my way along the wire. Then a whistle sounded and we were told to stop. We’d had no food since the dismal breakfast hours earlier and there was none now. Men sank to the ground and we gulped gratefully at the water they gave us.

  It was during this half-hour break that a new humiliation was devised – singing. The
Kapos walked among us, picking individuals to sing some song from their past. Anything – as long as we put our all into it. Mumbling wouldn’t do; it had to be at full pelt, at the tops of our voices. I don’t remember what I sang – probably something I’d learned in the soft, warm atmosphere of the Rapaport school, with its blue and green uniforms, so different from my stripes, and the polished floors, such a world away from the hard, rutted pot-holes of the Quarantine Block at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some of the older men found this difficult. The more traditional of them only sang psalms in the synagogue and Shabbat. I could see the smouldering hatred in their eyes as the Kapos jeered and pointed, landing the odd clout with a club if they didn’t like what they heard.

  Back at work again, I had a lucky break. A Kapo swapped me with one of the shovellers from the rock-pile, so I wasn’t staggering up and down anymore. It was still hard, driving the shovel into the unyielding pile, filling the barrows and unloading into the men’s aprons. You try to twist, find a different position, change your angle, anything to stop the pain in your spine. What I couldn’t do was stop, not if I wanted to keep my skull in one piece. I suppose it was handy that I’d worked for old Dombek in Killov’s factory. I could lift and carry better than most and it occurred to me that some of the men around me, dropping things and keeling over, had been accountants and bank managers. They must have been completely out of their depth.

  Time. You don’t know how you miss it until it’s taken away from you. At school, we lived by the bell. At home, there was the ritual of meal-time, even in the Kamionka. At the factory we’d clocked in and clocked out. At Auschwitz there were no clocks and we worked until we were told to stop or until we dropped.

  So I’m guessing when I say we worked until about six in the evening, a twelve-hour day with thirty minutes rest, little water and no food. Welcome to Auschwitz. I didn’t yet know about the wrought iron words above the main gate of Auschwitz I, the bitterly ironic slogan they’d imported from KL Dachau – Arbeit Macht Frei: work makes you free. If I had, I wouldn’t have felt particularly free that evening as we took our tools back and lined up again in fives outside Block Ten. Here we were at another ritual unique to camps like this one – the Appell, the evening roll-call.

  I remember standing there, my body caked with cold sweat and chalk dust as the SS carried out the head count. A formality, surely? The work of minutes. No, that wasn’t the point. The point was that everybody, even the dead, had to be accounted for. And if the count took an hour, two, all night, so be it. In time we got used to it. Used to seeing the corpses lying on the ground at the end of the lines, as if dead men could answer a roll-call. Men you’d seen carrying rocks hours earlier, struggling with shovels at the rock-pile, lay pale and bloody on the still uneven ground, their heads shattered and their bodies kicked to a pulp. You might have seen this happen, but you couldn’t stop it; you couldn’t even pause. A man dies in front of you – step round him. A neighbour from the Kamionka sinks to his knees with exhaustion – ignore him because he’s going to die and if you help him, you’ll die too. This was the law of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was unspoken and universal and it was the law of the jungle.

  Unterscharführer Kurpanik had an important role to play. Surely, even us Jews could recognise that. He was accountable to the camp commandant for the exact numbers in the Quarantine Block. In all other respects he was a law unto himself. And the same ritual happened the next morning and every morning. If anyone had had the temerity to die in the night, to slip away in agony and despair crammed with the still-living in his bunk, he must still be there in the morning, lying on the ground of the Appell, his name in the ledger of the damned.

  After the roll-call, we lined up again outside our hut for the evening meal, enamel bowls at the ready. The official menus at Auschwitz-Birkenau, some of which have survived, talk of soup with meat four times a week and with vegetables on the other three days. I don’t remember ever seeing any meat and the vegetables were turnips and potatoes – the food the Gentiles in Bedzin and Wodzislaw fed to their pigs. Occasionally, it would be varied with cabbage, swede or sugar beet, but the end product was the same – a thin, grey slurry that tasted revolting. Even on that first day, however, we slurped it gratefully, ravenous after our day’s exertions. There was no bread to eat with it and of course no spoons – metal objects could be sharpened into weapons, the last thing the Kapos or the SS wanted. I learned, like the others, to save part of the breakfast bread ration to eat with the soup in the evening.

  I waited in line, hauled up my sleeve to show my number to the Kapo and he slopped the soup into my bowl. And that was another lesson I learned quickly. If you work hard, if you’d done the Kapos a favour or if they liked you, you might get a thick piece of vegetable from the bottom of the pot. If you’d pissed them off, forget it. You were scum and that’s exactly what you got.

  What this actually was, was slow starvation. Next time you see liberation photographs of the camps taken by disbelieving British, Russian and American soldiers and the Red Cross, look at the state of the survivors. They look like walking skeletons, the living dead; many of them were so far gone they didn’t make it even after liberation and their photographs are all that we have of them. We called such living corpses Muselmänner, Muslims, and to this day I don’t know why. Perhaps newsreels in cinemas before the war showed starving people in India, I don’t know. If you became a Müsselmann, you’d probably die, but on the way to that state of emaciation, you’d meet another selection. Weak from hunger, you’d make mistakes in your work, slow down, get ill. Any of these things were crimes in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and they guaranteed a beating to death, a bullet in the head or a long walk to the gas chambers. Somebody else would carry you to the crematorium.

  After the soup, the latrine and the wash room. I don’t know if I actually shit this time – I probably did because you quickly trained your bowels to behave. There was no getting up in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature, unless you wanted to go on your bunk and the consequences of that didn’t bear thinking about.

  Each of us had our own little bundle which we stashed with our straw mattresses on the bunks. Our shoes were here at night-time, our clothes if we dared remove them and our food bowls. We didn’t have anything else. The bundles became our pillows and we daren’t leave any part of them lying about or they’d be stolen. No shoes meant running barefoot over the broken ground with sharp stones slicing your soles. No bowl meant no food. Reporting anything missing meant a beating. The stuff was your responsibility; the loss of it was your fault. I never saw a Bedzin man steal anything, but we all knew that we would steal, if push came to shove, because that was the nature of the camp – the law of the jungle, remember?

  New arrivals had turned up at Block Ten during the afternoon as they had at the other barracks. These men were strangers, Polish Jews certainly, but not from Bedzin. It was the continuation of a rolling programme. We had replaced an earlier consignment and as men died or fell by the wayside, others replaced them. There was the usual shouting of the Kapos, the kicks and cuffs, the new men terrified into silence, wondering what kind of Hell they’d stumbled into. Not all of them would see the next day. For me, this second night would be different. Yes, I was still terrified; yes, I was still depressed. But the pervert who had attacked me the night before had gone. I’d never been so tired in my life and as my head hit my food bowl, I fell asleep.

  Morning in Auschwitz-Birkenau: the dawn chorus of barked orders, guttural German and the crashing back of the barrack door. I was desperate to get to the latrine. The lack of food for those days followed by the hard bread, ghastly soup and dirty water were taking their toll. I just made it in time and was sitting on the latrine when I noticed a middle-aged man a few holes along literally poking in his own shit. I vaguely remembered him from the Kamionka and knew his name was Yitzak. He was glaring wildly around him in all directions as he rummaged about. Several people saw it but most looked away. Men went mad in Auschwitz. It was their
way of coping; the mind closing down completely against what was happening. Paddling his fingers in his turds might just have been Yitzak’s own hellish way out.

  But that wasn’t it. Not this time. Not with this man. He seemed to find something and scuttled off to the wash room. I followed and saw Yitzak washing his hands keeping his right fist tightly clenched. I kept him in sight as he made his way back to Block Ten and was horrified to see Blockältester Rudi leaning against the timbers.

  He beckoned Yitzak over and I expected the club and the boot and another Bedzin resident would be on his way to meet his God. Instead the two men began talking earnestly, in whispers I couldn’t hear and I thought it best to get into the hut to get ready for the day’s work.

  In the few moments we had before breakfast, Yitzak came in and was full of himself. He’d swallowed three or four small diamonds, family heirlooms, during the clearance of the Kamionka. With so little to eat, only one had come out so far, and he’d found it that morning. I don’t know what Yitzak did in Bedzin before this madness but he was crafty and streetwise. If you’ve got nothing, as with the rest of us, you’ve got no negotiating power. A diamond wouldn’t buy a Jew his freedom but it might get him some preferential treatment. Yitzak told us, in staccato whispers, that someone had shopped him to Blockältester Rudi but he’d been able to do a deal. In our ignorance, we had no idea what that meant.

  Astonishingly, the roll-call was a full house; no one had died during the night. This seemed normal to us then, but we soon came to realise how unusual it was. As we lined up, bowls ready for breakfast, I saw Yitzak get an extra slice of bread and a double helping of margarine and sausage. The Kapos were past masters at lining their own pockets. The bread ration was supposed to be one loaf to every four prisoners, but the Kapos cut it into five and kept the middle piece for themselves. This they could eat or sell as they liked. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, we killed each other by percentages.