The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘But … I mean … How was … ?’ There was no other way of asking other than directly. ‘How did it work?’ That’s how Lamont Williams asked the old man on the ninth floor.

  ‘How did it work? Listen. It worked like a factory, smooth like a factory, a factory that turned living people into corpses. I mean this. Really, this is what it did. Once the SS chose you for work in the Sonderkommando, you had no choice – other than your own death what would come immediately in a way you didn’t know – you had no choice but to work in one of five groups. Remember it, five different types of work the Sonderkommando did.’

  ‘Five kinds of work,’ Lamont Williams said quietly.

  ‘Five kinds of work,’ Mr Mandelbrot continued. ‘The work of the Sonderkommando was broken into five different kinds of work. Sometimes we swapped but mostly not. I did all five kinds of work in my time in the Sonderkommando.

  ‘A transport of Jews would come in cattle cars, cattle wagons, from anywhere in Europe, anywhere, everywhere. You know what it means, cattle cars, Mr Lamont?’

  ‘Like a train?’

  ‘Yes, but it was a train of wagons what they had used before the war to transport cattle. Since the transport of people –’

  ‘Of Jews?’

  ‘Yes, of course Jews. Since it could have come to Auschwitz-Birkenau from anywhere in Europe, the people could have been on it for days; one, two, maybe three days on it without food, without any water, without medicines, without any possibility of cleaning themselves. You know what it means? They were packed in with whatever belongings they could carry and before even arriving some of them would be dead. If the transport was coming from one of the ghettoes they were already weak, some of them sick and ready to die before they even got on the train. Some would be crushed inside the cattle cars; old people, sometimes small children got crushed.

  ‘So the train would arrive at Birkenau, the doors would open and the people what had been packed inside would have SS men shouting at them to get down.’

  ‘Off of the train?’

  ‘Yes. They had dogs barking like in a hunt, hunting dogs barking at the people on the trains. The people got off the trains but some got off slow if they were old or sick. Some didn’t get off at all. These were the people what had died on the cattle trucks, on the trains. The ones who got off, fell off, their belongings in their hands, were greeted by the SS and the dogs, shouting, barking at them. These people didn’t know where they were. They didn’t know about Auschwitz, they had never heard of Auschwitz. It’s only famous now because of what was about to happen to them then, them, and all the ones before them and all the ones after them.

  ‘The inside of the cars were emptied of the dead by members of the Kanada Kommando. You remember I told you about Kanada?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Kanada workers had to climb up on to the cattle trucks and pull off the bodies of the Jews who had died on their way to Auschwitz. The rest of the transport who stood exhausted with their belongings – and there might have been as many as two thousand from all the cattle cars – might be met with beatings straight away.’

  ‘From the SS men?’

  ‘Yes. And if it was night – because the transports arrived day and night – they would be blinded by floodlights. They see only white light; they hear only screaming from the SS, barking from the dogs and the crying of their children. They feel the beating. Yes? Hurry, hurry! Sometimes they were beaten as soon as they got off the trains, before they even knew the name of the place they were in. They were told to give the prisoners from the Kanada Kommando all what they had so that they could be transferred to where they were being relocated.’

  ‘Relocated?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what they were told. Then it was time for what was called a Selektion. An SS officer, a registrar and one of the physicians, a doctor, would be there.’

  ‘A Jewish doctor?’

  ‘No, no, an SS doctor. The women were separated from the men and then each person had to walk past the SS man and the doctor and they would select if you were to go to the left or the right. The doctor would wave a stick to the left or to the right. Usually he didn’t say anything, just looked at the person and pointed. The people didn’t know whether it was better to be sent to the left or to the right. To the right meant you went into some work detail, some slave labour detail. To the left meant death, gassing. If they needed more slave labour a higher proportion might be saved. A good Selektion was when maybe as many as thirty per cent were sent to work in some part of the camp.’

  ‘So seventy per cent were gassed?’

  ‘Yes, that was a good Selektion. It was never less than that. Sometimes one hundred per cent of the transport what came in was gassed immediately. The doctor would wave his stick left or right as each person walked up to him for inspection. It could take a long time with so many people. Sometimes the doctor got tired and would give one big sweeping wave of the stick to the left. This meant anybody what he hadn’t got to see yet, all the people what were still waiting, they were to go to the left.’

  ‘To be gassed?’

  ‘Yes, to the gas chamber, yes.’

  ‘You said there were five groups, five kinds of work.’

  ‘Yes, there were five kinds of work what the Sonderkommando did. It’s good you remember. You have to remember it.

  ‘First there was the undressing phase and the transport of the clothes to Kanada.

  ‘Then came the removal of the bodies from the gas chamber.

  ‘There was the shaving of the hair –’

  ‘From dead bodies?’

  ‘Yes, shaving of the hair and extraction of gold teeth from the dead bodies after they were gassed.

  ‘There were the stokers.’

  ‘Stokers?’

  ‘Yes, this was those Sonderkommando members what worked with the ovens cremating the people what had just been gassed.

  ‘Then was the disposal of the remains. This means disposing of the ashes and the crushing of bones, also to be disposed. After you burn a body there are bones and teeth left. We had to grind them into dust.’

  ‘You did this?’

  ‘Yes, this was all the work of the Sonderkommando. At times I have worked in each of the different sections.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘I had no choice if I was to keep living. None of us had a choice. It was “live in this hell, a world like no human being had ever known before, or not live at all”. At first you don’t believe it even as you see it. You don’t know where you are and you don’t think you’re going to be able to get through it.’

  ‘Did you ever want to die … instead of doin’ that … work?’

  ‘Yes, many times. At the start of your shift you want to die. You can’t imagine that you’re going to get through even one hour. And you’re carrying around this heaviness, a weight in your chest like you’re going to split open, your heart is going to burst. But all the time you’re thinking that somebody has to survive just to tell what happened. Somebody has to get the story out. Maybe that will be me what gets the story out so that the world will know. Otherwise, how will anybody know what they did there?’

  ‘You wanted to survive to get the story out?’

  ‘Yes, for what other reason was there to live?’

  ‘Your family?’

  ‘When I saw what they were doing I knew my family must be already dead. If any of them survived the ghetto, I knew they wouldn’t survive the transport, the cattle trucks. And if they survived the cattle trucks they wouldn’t survive the Selektion. In the Sonderkommando you learn more than you ever wanted to know about death. You stood at the door between life and death. You saw everything.

  ‘When a transport arrived we had to immediately report to the undressing room of the crematorium complex what we were assigned to. We would be waiting there for the victims, for the Jews. They came from all over Europe: Greece, France, Hungary, everywhere. There were in Birkenau, not counting two little houses what they sometimes
used, what was called the “red house” and the “white house”, there were four crematoria each with its own gas chamber: Crematoria II, III, IV and V.’

  ‘What about number one?’

  ‘Number one was in Auschwitz I but the others were in Birkenau, all of them. Birkenau was Auschwitz II.’

  ‘Where you were.’

  ‘Yes. Each crematorium had a yard, closed in so that no one from outside could see what was going on. The Jews had to cross the courtyard to get to the crematorium building, the building with a huge chimney like on a factory that housed also the gas chamber as well as the ovens. But before that, the victims were often made to stand in the courtyard while an SS officer, someone like Oberscharführer Moll …’ Mr Mandelbrot shook his head slowly at the mention of this man’s name. ‘Oberscharführer Moll, a terrible man, would often make a short speech, not always, but the speech was always the same meaning. He would tell them they were going to be given a shower and after this they would be sent to work. Then they were sent to what was called the “undressing room” attached to that crematorium. There would be numbered hooks in the undressing room, he would say, and they were to leave their things near one of the hooks and remember the number of the hook so they could get their things when they came out of the showers.’

  ‘Were there really hooks with numbers?’

  ‘Yes, there were hooks with numbers and in the gas chamber there were even … What do you call it, where the water comes out in the shower?’

  ‘Shower heads, faucets?’

  ‘Yes, they had some shower heads, faucets in the ceiling of the gas chambers but they were not connected to anything. They were just shower heads. No water came out of them. It was all just to trick them. Everything was to trick them so they wouldn’t panic, to keep them as calm as possible so it would all run as smoothly as possible like clockwork. They wanted it all done efficiently and they had to have it like this. There were times when more than ten thousand people were gassed and burned in one day.’

  ‘Ten thousand?’

  ‘Yes. You cannot imagine it. It’s just … worse than your worst nightmare. They needed each step of the process to operate efficiently. Well, yes, the Germans always like order. You know this. They got the people to go down the stairs of the building –’

  ‘What did it look like?’

  ‘What, the building?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It looked like a normal building, red brick with red shingle roof and a huge chimney. Nothing … you know … if you didn’t know … There was nothing what would tell anybody from the outside that inside is a gas chamber and another room with five ovens for no other reason than burning people. Sometimes, when the ovens couldn’t keep up, the bodies were burned in open pits. I remember the chimneys on Crematoria II and III were taller than the others. It was the design.’

  ‘Who dug the pits?’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘The Sonderkommando?’

  ‘Yes, we dug the pits, we took the bodies of the gassed Jews and threw them into the pits and there was a way to do even this, an order how the Nazis wanted it … to make the burning better. They liked order.’

  ‘Yeah, you said that …’

  ‘People know this about them. They had the people go down the stairs into the undressing room in files.’

  ‘Like in rows?’

  ‘Yes, rows of maybe five at a time. Five people would go down the stairs and then another five and then another five. Like this for the whole transport. It might be up to two thousand people this way.’

  ‘Why did they listen, the Jews? Why’d they do it?’

  ‘I told you, they were told that it was just for a shower, disinfection before being sent to a work detail and also they did it because there were SS standing around all them and even right up to the stairs at the entrance of the building, the SS stood around them with guns. A few of the SS even went downstairs into the undressing room where we were.’

  ‘Didn’t people suspect what was down there?’

  ‘How would they know?’

  ‘I don’t know … rumours?’

  ‘Yes, there were rumours and some people did suspect. You are right. When there were people who suspected they might move slow down the stairs but then would come down on them a storm of beatings from the SS so hard it could kill you on the spot, so hard that the people went down the stairs away from the beatings they knew were real for sure down to the fate that was still only for them just rumours. People hang on to hope as long as they can, Mr Lamont. Maybe down there is better than up here? Even the ones who suspected, they didn’t know for sure. It had never happened in the history of the world what was about to happen to them. No other people ever had this happen to them. But it didn’t really matter what they thought. This was what was going to happen to them and what they thought only had to do with how long it took. If the Jews could be fooled until they were in the gas chamber it all went along a lot quicker, a lot smoother.’

  ‘Did you talk to them?’

  ‘Not much. We weren’t allowed to talk much, only to say certain things the Nazis had told us to say.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘ “Get undressed. You’re going to have a shower. Remember where you put your clothes.” This sort of thing.’

  ‘You lied to them? How could you –’

  ‘Look, what should I do, tell them the truth? Mr Lamont, they are downstairs. They are defenceless. They are undressing then they are naked. For what should we tell them the truth? We wanted to try to take their fear away. Can you see them? You have to see them; mothers with small children, sometimes with babies at their breast, young girls, teenage girls, people ashamed to be naked, old people what we had to help undress –’

  ‘You had to undress them?’

  ‘Yes, sometimes when they were too slow for the Nazis, we had to undress them; people like our fathers and mothers, our grandparents, already sick and weak, frightened. Why frighten them more? What good would it do? We could provide the last comfort what they were going to get on earth before the gas chamber. What good would it do to tell them the truth?’

  ‘What would have happened to you if you told them the truth? I mean, didn’t you ever want to warn them? Why didn’t you ever warn them?’

  ‘Why didn’t we warn them?’

  *

  The first five came down the stairs. No one wanted to look at them. Henryk Mandelbrot was one of approximately twenty Sonderkommando members standing in the undressing room of Crematorium II. He stood in the middle of the room. The floor was grey concrete and the walls were white. Around the entire circumference of the room were smooth pine benches and above these there were hooks with numbers next to them. It looked like a very large, very narrow, but otherwise unremarkable gymnasium locker room. When the number of Sonderkommando men outnumbered the victims, as it always did for the first minute or so, it was hard to find an excuse not to look the victims in the eye. What made it worse was that, unless for some reason it was an all-male group, the first to come down were usually women. In addition to whatever the women had just been through and in addition to whatever they suspected they were about to go through, they were exhausted, confused and very ashamed to have to undress to the point of complete nakedness in front of strangers. There were married women who had only ever been naked in front of their husbands. There were old women, little girls and teenage girls from small villages, shtetls, girls who had only ever been naked in front of their mothers years earlier. They found it hard to imagine even being married to a man who was permitted to touch their bodies and to see them naked. Now here they were being told to undress in brusque, sharp tones by SS men whom each one knew meant them no good; men of the type that had put them in ghettoes, men who were fully dressed, armed, uniformed soldiers of Hitler. And it wasn’t enough to simply undress. They had to undress very quickly. The SS men greeted the women’s naked bodies variously, at best with short-tempered indifference, usually with harsh words sometimes further
humiliating them, and frequently with violence.

  The first five women were spoken to firmly in a no-nonsense manner by the SS men in the undressing room. Some of them wondered why armed SS men had to watch them get undressed for a shower. Something was not right. And who were these other men, seemingly prisoners, also interested in getting them undressed as quickly as possible to go to the shower room next door? These men, the prisoners, seemed to be Jews. They were speaking to them in Yiddish but they would not look at them.

  ‘Come on now. You have to hurry. Leave your things by a hook and remember the number on it,’ Henryk Mandelbrot said to a woman whose shame seemed to be paralysing her. He couldn’t look her in the eye as he spoke but he saw an SS man looking at him as he was speaking to the slowly undressing woman and then, with small relief, he saw the officer’s gaze shift from him to other Sonderkommando men, to Schubach, Ochrenberg, Touba and Raijsmann, as another five women came down the stairs, then another five and another five followed by another and still another. Very quickly there were more victims than Sonderkommando or SS men in the undressing room even though once undressed the women were ordered down the hall to the room with the shower faucets. Now some men started coming down the stairs in rows of five. They were being screamed at by the SS men upstairs or was it the five people immediately behind them or the five behind them? Already the beatings had started up the stairs to make things go faster and five pushed five to escape the beatings. The first five men saw women undressing and clothes left in piles around the room.