The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘You can pick your things up after the shower,’ Mandelbrot said to an old man who seemed to have trouble believing what he was seeing. The man moved slowly, too slowly. Henryk Mandelbrot knew the man would be beaten any second if he didn’t start making progress undressing.

  ‘You have to hurry!’ A baby was crying, which set off another baby. A mother tried to comfort it but she had to undress both the baby and herself quickly. An SS man was watching her and she saw him. With the baby in her arms, she turned her back to him.

  ‘The showers …’ the old man asked Mandelbrot. ‘They’re the same ones for men and for women?’

  ‘Yes, they’re the same,’ Mandelbrot said to the old man without emotion, at the same time helping him with his coat. Five more came down, followed by another five, some of whom were freshly bleeding from their heads, all of whom were pushed by the five behind them. Then another five …

  ‘You’re a Jew?’ the old man asked Henryk Mandelbrot.

  ‘Yes. You have to hurry. They’ll beat both of us if you’re too –’

  ‘It’s gas, isn’t it?’

  Mandelbrot turned away from this old man as five more people came down the stairs into the undressing room, followed by another five, then another five and another five after that. Henryk Mandelbrot had to look away from the stairway. But where could he look? Another five came down followed by another five and then another five. A girl of around twelve was carrying her brother who looked to be no more than three. Mandelbrot went to her and her brother.

  ‘Don’t touch him, you Jewish murderer! He’ll die with me … in my arms.’

  Then came another five, then another, a carpenter whose wife used to say he worked too much, a tailor came, then a man with a singing voice that all his neighbours had enjoyed since he was a child, a teacher was there who had hoped to be a principal some day, a widow who sewed clothes, a nurse who had had an affair with a patient, a slightly overweight boy of eleven with wavy hair who felt he had never been able to live up to his parents’ expectations, he was also there. The fattest man of his village was going to have to undress in a hurry too. A newly graduated doctor was there and, unbeknown to him, way off in the corner there was one of his professors from medical school. A man who had been unfaithful to his wife once in another town while on business was there, a pharmacist who had always gone out of his way to help people, a girl who kept calling out for her sister, a woman who had brought food to widows in the hope of pleasing God, a thief, a man who sold candles, a prostitute who had run away from home, a man who failed to get into art school but who had kept drawing all his life never showing his work to anyone, the wife of a man who hawked spices, an engineer, a fishmonger, a woman whose husband often embarrassed her was there, a man who worked with his brothers in a foundry, the daughter of a stonemason, a man whose blindness was not evident to others, a mathematician, a woman who loved fashion magazines was there with her daughter who dreamed of one day being in them. Then another five came down, including a rabbi and a chazan and a woman who had tried to see every movie that came to her town, and still the Jews kept coming. They heard the command to undress and began to do what everybody else was doing before being forced by SS men into the other room to wait for the shower. Then another five.

  The undressing room was crowded and hot. Schubach, Ochrenberg, Touba and Raijsmann were there with Henryk Mandelbrot. Spread out, they and the others in the detail were saying the same things to the Jews who kept coming in wave after wave of five. Under the eye of an SS man, a Sonderkommando member, Wentzel, began to use his fists on a woman who undressed too slowly. An undressing man looked at him in disgust and the woman undressed faster. This was a full transport of close to 2000 people. The undressing room was filling up even as it emptied when the naked people went to the room next door. There was going to be a huge mound of clothes to clear; clothes of all types and sizes as well as all the little, small, last-minute things people took with them in their clothes or on their person. There would be small photos of loved ones, a letter of commendation from the German Army from World War I, a comb, a grandparent’s wedding ring, a page blank but for someone’s signature, a miniature teddy bear, some cash imperfectly hidden in the lining of a coat, a pen, a love letter, something small for the baby to eat, a telephone number scrawled on the back of a bus ticket and a yarmulke for after the shower.

  Henryk Mandelbrot saw Ochrenberg go over to a beautiful young woman with dark eyes and thick black hair who was there with a child, a sister or a daughter. Mandelbrot couldn’t tell. What was wrong? Ochrenberg was there too long. Was he talking to her? He was taking too long. The woman stopped undressing, looked at Ochrenberg and started shouting something. Suddenly Ochrenberg moved away from her as fast as he could. From a distance Mandelbrot saw the mood of tension and anxiety change around this woman to one of unequivocal panic. The SS men saw it too. Like a ripple spreading across a pond after a stone has been thrown in, the closer to Ochrenberg’s woman, the greater the panic.

  ‘It’s not water in the showers. It’s gas! It’s gas!’ the woman shouted.

  ‘Gas?’

  ‘They mean to gas us!’

  A rain of blows came down on this half-undressed woman. People, even the child, moved away from her as the SS men clubbed her to the ground, beating her furiously. She lay there, panting, her torn slip leaking blood from her lacerated breasts and head. What had Ochrenberg hoped to achieve? The last of the transport were being shoved down the stairs as the young woman lay unconscious. Mandelbrot had to take the clothes off her child, who was now hysterical. The child struggled violently, twisting in every direction to break free, twisting in Mandelbrot’s arms like a creature possessed. If he let her go they would beat her too.

  The last few rows of five could not help see how terrified those ahead of them were. They saw the young woman collapsed amid the piles of clothing. A mother from among the last in was calling out, ‘My son! My son is missing! He is in a blue coat. He’s wearing a blue coat. He’s three years old. I just want to find my son. He was holding my …’ The woman started to go back up the stairs, explaining that she wanted to find her son, but an SS man grabbed her around the waist, threw her to the ground and shot her in the head. By then most of the transport were out of the undressing room and either in the corridor that led from the undressing room to the gas chamber or already in the gas chamber.

  Undressed, they went through the door, the only door, with the sign ‘To the Disinfection Room’. Strangers stood naked together in this room where the ceiling was markedly lower than in the undressing room. It was warm, warmer than the undressing room. At first they stood apart but as the room filled with more and more people they were forced to get closer and closer until they could not help but touch each other. Children cried. Adults tried to comfort them. Adults cried. Children looked for their parents. They called out for them as the room filled.

  ‘Where are you? Are you here? Take my hand.’

  Some were too ashamed to look at one another. Some looked in astonishment. What world was this? This was wrong. It felt wrong. Some looked at the shower faucets in the ceiling. Some looked for the God they and their parents and their grandparents had tried so hard to please. Some called out to the Germans in anger. They looked around the room as other people called out, called to each other, to their children, to the SS, to God. There were lights along the centre of the ceiling encaged for protection. Families, if they could, stayed close together. They hugged. When a father suspected the truth he would hug his wife and his children, not voicing his suspicion, but they would see him crying silently and they would cry. Soon everyone around them was crying. In the middle of the room were four pillars made of layers of metal mesh.

  People in the room with the shower faucets were too disoriented and distressed to notice the pillars immediately. Who thought about the architecture of the room? Would the water be hot? Would it be warm? Were there really enough faucets for all these people? But soon, any moment, everyone i
n the room would notice the pillars. People were packed into this room and at the door someone screamed with an unmatched urgency. This scream came from the last person, beaten by the butt of an SS rifle and pushed in. There was no longer any space left in the room. The truth was becoming clearer. They were all of them in a gas chamber. Many now knew what was going to happen after an SS man closed the sealed door.

  In the undressing room Henryk Mandelbrot and the other Sonderkommando men in this detail, including Schubach, Ochrenberg, Touba and Raijsmann, looked at each other and at the mountains of clothing. They were numb. They were always numb. Sometimes they were grateful they were not inside the gas chamber but mostly now they felt nothing.

  ‘What are you waiting for, you pieces of shit?’ an SS man shouted at them. ‘Pick up the clothes!’

  Pointing with the toe of his boot to the mother of the missing three-year-old boy in the blue coat, the SS man who had shot her said to Mandelbrot, ‘Here’s another one for you,’ and, putting his pistol away, he began to leave the undressing room hurriedly to try to see the gassing from the upstairs window outside. Suddenly he stopped and turned around to speak to Mandelbrot.

  ‘If the ovens are still backed up, take her to the pits while the others are getting the clothes. Be quick. I have another job for you men.’

  Outside the crematorium complex, a truck deceptively bearing the symbol of the Red Cross had arrived and from the back, sealed metal canisters were taken out. An SS man donned a gas mask and with a hammer and a knife he opened a canister. Its contents, Zyklon B, consisted of pellets of very porous rock saturated with hydrogen cyanide. The SS man in the gas mask now opened the hatches on top of the projections through the roof of the four metal mesh pillars in the gas chamber and poured in the Zyklon B. A man with this duty got extra cigarettes and, provided there were not too many officers crowding out the view, he got to watch the gassing through a sealed peephole in the door. It was a very popular task.

  The green pellets of Zyklon B fell to the bottom of each of the hollow pillars and, warmed in the preheated and now overcrowded chamber, the volatile hydrogen cyanide with which the pellets were saturated started to vapourise and diffuse out through the metal mesh. People nearest the pillars gasped first in shock but, very soon after, for breath. Then the coughing started all over the room and within minutes people were not any longer themselves. Their cells were being deprived of oxygen by the cyanide and they were being asphyxiated. As the cyanide took effect and their very organs screamed out for oxygen, people experienced a terror unlike any they had ever known, an instant unfiltered prerational autonomic primeval panic. But they were physically unable to stifle the reflex to breathe and so they breathed in more of the poison.

  The cyanide vapourising out of the pellets at the bottom of the pillars spread into the room through the metal mesh and rose upward. The lowest points in the room were initially the most toxic but with every second the rest of the room was catching up. It was in the seconds before the gas had colonised all parts of the room equally that the climbing started. People were not any longer remotely like the people they had been all their lives up to the time the pellets started taking effect. As consciousness began to leave them they behaved not like parents or husbands or wives or friends or brothers and sisters but like the most basic organisms without the capacity to do a single thing in their struggle not to die except try desperately to get away from the gas as it made its way upward and filled the room. The smallest, the weakest, the most frail were being crushed as the man with the beautiful singing voice, the carpenter, the younger of the two doctors, the engineer, the thief, climbed over and then stood on the body and sometimes then on the head of the woman whose husband used to embarrass her, the eleven-year-old boy with the wavy hair, the teacher, the prostitute, the daughter of the stonemason, the man who never showed anyone his drawings, the old man who was slow to undress, the woman who liked fashion magazines, her daughter. And on the children, and the old.

  The pain was quickly extreme. People drooled like animals. Their eyes bulged. Their bodies began to jerk in wild spasms as the gas rendered completely useless whatever oxygen they could find. After three minutes they were bleeding, some from the scramble, the struggle to the top of the heap, but all from the effect of the gas. They bled from their noses. They bled from their ears. People lost continence and many were pushed down into a mess of blood, urine, vomit and excrement as people with memories, affections, ambitions, relationships, opinions, values and accomplishments all merged into a tangled phalanx of human beings a metre deep covered in their own fluids, all of them gasping, their bodies jerking, their faces distorted by their agony. With their brains and their organs increasingly depleted of oxygen with every second, it was in a state of unimaginable terror and pain that they had their last thoughts. They were already no longer people.

  The Sonderkommando men in the undressing room heard the screams and knew well their pattern; louder and louder and louder until they reached a peak and then began to subside. They continued working, each man desperate for the arrival of the silence. They knew it was coming but they couldn’t wait for it. Then when the silence came, the agony from the next room would be over, leaving these men, the last to see the victims alive, to deduce it from the hellish distortions of their faces and from the contorted positions of their bodies within the tangle of bodies when the door was opened.

  Henryk Mandelbrot undressed the murdered mother of the three-year-old and threw her clothes on the pile. Knowing the ovens were still backed up, he dragged her by the arm to the burning pits outside where the corpses of a previous transport lay piled up waiting for Sonderkommando men to throw them on the pile in the ditches. As he got closer the flames rose higher than his eye could see. He coughed and almost choked on the smell. The men working here had tied material around their mouths and noses but Mandelbrot was there only to drop off one corpse. This wasn’t his detail. His eyes watered. He let go of the dead woman’s hand to rub his eyes and that’s when he saw the other men around him stop. He saw they were looking at Oberscharführer Moll standing at the edge of the pit.

  Oberscharführer Moll had in his arms a three-year-old boy with dark brown hair bundled up in a blue coat crying out for his mother. He let the boy drop from his arms to the ground so that the child lay winded on his back. The boy was in shock. Then with one recently polished boot raised high, Moll stomped down on the boy’s face. The child screamed in terror at what he saw coming towards him, and then wailed in agony. Oberscharführer Moll bent down to pick up the disfigured boy. He took the blue coat off the whimpering blood-soaked child, tossed the coat over his shoulder and then threw the boy like a sack of wheat on to the top of the pyre of burning bodies. Henryk Mandelbrot heard the child screaming from the top of the fire. The boy had not been dead when he was thrown in. Mandelbrot picked up the naked corpse of the child’s mother and slung it on the pyre next to her son, as close as he could. Then he hurried back to the undressing room.

  Schubach, Ochrenberg, Touba, Raijsmann, Wentzel and the others were working through the piles of clothes in the undressing room when he got back. The gas chamber should have been opened by then but, for some reason, that seemed to have been delayed. Mandelbrot was just realising this when Oberscharführer Schillinger appeared surrounded by a group of SS men.

  ‘Are they all here?’ he asked one of the SS men.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Each one?’

  ‘Yes, sir. The other one just got back.’

  ‘Good. All of you go immediately to the ovens in Crematorium III. Now! Hurry! All of you!’

  Henryk Mandelbrot and each of the others who had been with him in the undressing room knew that all of the ovens at Crematorium III and indeed all of the ovens at all four of Birkenau’s gas chamber and crematoria installations had no capacity for extra bodies. The ovens were not keeping up with the corpses they already had and were falling behind. This was why the mass pits outside were being used again. It didn’t mak
e any sense for these men to report to the ovens in Crematorium III, especially when their work on the most recent transport’s clothes in the undressing room of the Crematorium II complex to which they were assigned had not been completed. Additionally, the gas chamber next door to the ovens where they now stood still held the 2000 people, now corpses, just freshly gassed. It needed to be cleared and cleaned for the people who were already waiting outside listening to an SS officer tell them about their need to be disinfected before being transferred to their new work detail.

  But whatever their misgivings about the reasons behind the order, no one would delay obeying Oberscharführer Schillinger. Better they should run straight to the electric wire fence and end it that way. So they all went, unaccompanied by SS guards and without hesitation, to the ovens of Crematorium III. The smell of the burning flesh was nauseating. A few of them gagged. Among the stokers there was Zalman Gradowski who saw these men arrive as he was laying the corpse of a young man, the last of three people, onto the metal stretcher tray and was sliding it into the oven. Then he closed the heavy semi-circular oven door and the bodies started burning.

  ‘What are you all doing here? We’re not ready for any more. Look!’ he said, directing their attention to a pile of corpses waiting to be pushed into the ovens. ‘Mandelbrot, what’s going on?’