The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  Gradowski continued his explanation to Henryk Mandelbrot. ‘A man was found who could make contact with a woman who could in turn make contact with the women in the Pulverraum.’ He looked around to see if they were being watched. ‘Lewental has a brother, Noah, who is an electrician.’

  ‘Ah yes, Noah the electrician!’

  ‘Being an electrician, the younger Lewental has access to parts of the camp ordinary prisoners never get to.’

  ‘Yeah, but he still has to find the right woman. He can’t interview for the job.’

  ‘He has already found the perfect woman, so he says. She works in the Effektenlager, in Kanada.’

  ‘That’s great; she’ll be in good shape.’

  ‘Yeah, and she’s from the Ciechanow group. That’s where the Lewentals are from. She was his girlfriend before the war. Zalman knows her as well. She’s going to be the contact between the women in the Pulverraum at the munitions factory and the Sonderkommando resistance. We’ll receive the gun powder, store it and, with the Russian, figure out how to convert it into weapons. Then when the signal comes from the Auschwitz Military Council, when they’re ready for the camp-wide rebellion, we’ll try to use everything we’ve got to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria. Who knows, maybe some of us will even escape from here.’

  ‘Do you think any of this is going to work?’

  Gradowski turned to him. ‘Henryk, we’re all going to die anyway.’

  ‘Who in the Sonderkommando knows about this?’

  ‘Only those in the resistance know.’

  ‘Well, I assume if you’re telling me then –’

  ‘Yes, Henryk, I’m asking you to join. So will you join?’

  ‘Yes, of course. What’s there to think about? I don’t understand why you took so long to ask me.’

  ‘It’s just that … if we can … it will be the most dangerous enterprise undertaken in the entire history of this death camp.’

  ‘What here isn’t dangerous?’

  ‘That’s true, but you’ve never had any choice in anything that’s happened to you since you first came through the gates. This now would be your choice.’

  ‘Still, Zalman, can you seriously imagine me choosing not to be involved? And even if I did decline your invitation, there’s sure to be others here you could approach.’

  ‘Yes, but they’re not all trustworthy and, anyway, I really didn’t want to have to tell Lewental you’d declined.’

  Now it was Henryk Mandelbrot’s turn to smile. ‘Since when were you so scared of Lewental?’

  But Gradowski didn’t smile, in fact he turned away.

  As they spoke quietly and still undetected, the last of the people from the transport were pushed naked inside the gas chamber attached to Crematorium III and an SS guard slammed the door shut. People began to cry at the sound the door made. A signal was given and within minutes the green pellets were being dropped in from above. A woman who had shown some considerable skill at the violin looked around in terror, realising she had become separated from the last person there whom she knew. She called out for her friend. It was drowned out by the screams of 2000 strangers. She was going to die alone and she knew it. A young mother from Belgium, quite unusually beautiful, hugged her daughters as tightly as she could with both arms. It had started.

  ‘No, I’m not scared of Lewental,’ said Zalman Gradowski, looking away from him in the direction of the burning pits.

  ‘So? I don’t get it,’ Mandelbrot asked.

  ‘Henryk, I didn’t really think you’d decline. But …’

  ‘So why’d you wait to ask me?’

  ‘What does it matter now?’

  ‘No, I want to know.’

  Inside the gas chamber of Crematorium III the climbing had started.

  ‘If you had declined,’ said Gradowski, ‘given how much I’ve had to tell you … Well, I don’t know what Lewental might’ve done.’

  The dogs had started barking again. Another transport had just arrived.

  part ten

  IT WAS NIGHT. The interminable Appel, the roll call, was over and the rations that masqueraded as the evening’s meals had been distributed when Rosa Rabinowicz, hoping she hadn’t been detected, reached the entrance of a block that was not hers within the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Looking around furtively, she spoke to the Blockälteste, the senior female prisoner responsible for a block within the barracks.

  ‘You have women here who work in the Weichsel Union Metallwerke factory?’

  ‘What if we do?’

  ‘Can you let me in?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m looking for a Jewish woman who works there in the Pulverraum, the one who lost her parents. I have a last message for her from them.’

  ‘What are you talking about? There’s not a Jewish woman in here that hasn’t lost her parents.’

  The disingenuousness of Rosa’s approach had been as disarming as she had intended it to be.

  Rosa Rabinowicz kept looking around. She was in danger just being there. ‘Can you let me in? Then I can explain.’

  ‘Why can’t you explain out here?’ Looking her up and down, the Blockälteste saw that Rosa seemed less starved than most of the other prisoners. What had this Jew done to be better fed than the average prisoner? the woman wondered. Perhaps she shouldn’t be trusted? Or was she somebody with influence worth befriending? No ordinary Jew trying to find another Jew in Auschwitz-Birkenau would describe the person being sought as the one who had lost his or her parents. Who was she? Was she dangerous? What did she really want?

  Rosa reached inside a pocket and pulled out a silver watch, which she showed the Blockälteste. ‘It’s yours if you let me in.’

  ‘Where did you get that?’ the woman said in astonishment.

  ‘You get the watch if you let me in. You don’t ever get any explanations.’

  ‘You’re from Kanada, aren’t you?’ the Blockälteste said, letting Rosa inside the block. In Kanada one could find food, or goods from the gassed victims’ belongings to trade for food.

  Finding Noah Lewental had given Rosa the courage to make this approach. Not only was there someone left alive who had known her from before the start of this nightmare, but that someone was Noah. Her parents were almost certainly dead and in all likelihood Elise, her long-lost daughter, was also dead. Her siblings, if not already dead, would sooner or later be killed because that was the logic of the place. To be alive there was an aberration that would be corrected as soon as you had outlived your utility to the Third Reich. But Noah was still alive. He had found her in this vast factory of death and he had enlisted her in a plan to try to sabotage the killing machinery. Most people there could not bring themselves even to imagine fighting back. The SS were fully armed and equipped, well fed, strong and healthy. To try was to commit certain suicide and though most knew that death in this place was inevitable, few could bring themselves to hasten it. What if a husband, a child, a parent was still alive? Didn’t you want more than anything else to see them? Your good friend suicide, your best friend, would wait for you. Suicide was the one card always up your sleeve. It was just a matter of choosing the time to play it. But resisting the SS? Better to dream of fleeing to America. It was more realistic.

  But now Rosa was not alone. Noah Lewental’s presence there had rekindled her sense of self and she was going to resist. It was with this resolve that she had bribed her way into the block. Of course, as the Blockälteste had spat out with a mix of suspicion and contempt, Rosa knew that almost everybody there had lost their parents. But coupled with the silver watch from Kanada, of value as barter, the approach had got her into the block housing two girls employed, she’d been told, in the Pulverraum, the gunpowder area, of the Weichsel Union Metallwerke munitions factory, who might be prepared to help smuggle out quantities of gunpowder.

  Rosa observed that a not uncommon evening ritual in many of the blocks of the women’s camp had already begun in this one too. At the back o
f the room, next to a woman picking the lice off another woman’s scalp, maybe half a dozen young Jewish women were sitting or lying listening to another woman whose turn it was to regale them with descriptions of food from home, dishes she remembered from before the war. Beside them a woman with glazed eyes and parched lips breathed through her mouth and shook with fever. Dysentery or typhus, who among them could tell? She could have been anyone and, live or die that evening, tomorrow it would be someone else. There was no one there who knew her full name, no one close enough to hear this woman wheezing who spoke her language. She’d been like this off and on for days. Nights were the worst and this was the worst of the nights. She’d never make it through another Appel. Falling out of and then back into consciousness long enough to hear a babble of languages she didn’t understand, long enough to see the lice being flicked from another woman’s scalp nearby, she was terrified. Surrounded by people who ignored her, she knew in her rare sentient moments that she was utterly alone and that this was how she would die. Who would be able to tell anyone after the war what had happened to this nameless woman?

  ‘She would use a kilogram of beef and cut the fat off. Then she would add one tablespoon of paprika, one tablespoon of crushed garlic –’

  ‘My mother added onions.’

  ‘I’m not up to the onions. You interrupted. My mother used onions …’

  ‘And the beans?’

  ‘Yes, red beans, of course.’

  Rosa approached the two girls whom the Blockälteste had pointed out to her.

  ‘Are you Estusia?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, who are you?’ the young woman answered.

  ‘Are you the Estusia who works in the Pulverraum at the Union Metallwerke factory?’

  ‘Yes. Who are you?’ she asked again, her sister, a girl of no more than fifteen, close beside her.

  ‘My name is Rosa Rabinowicz. Can I talk to you … alone?’

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘I’ll tell you if we can talk …’ She looked around the block. ‘Can we talk … alone?’

  ‘This is my sister, Hannah. She’ll come with us.’

  ‘No offence, but it might be better if she didn’t.’

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Better for everyone.’

  ‘I tell her everything.’

  ‘Well, you may want to reconsider that.’

  ‘She works with me.’

  ‘In the Pulverraum?’

  ‘Not in the Pulverraum but in the Union Metallwerke factory.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Old enough to answer questions put to her by strangers when she thinks there’s a good reason to answer.’

  ‘How old are you?’ Rosa asked the younger of the Weiss sisters, Hannah.

  ‘I’m fifteen. What do you want from us?’

  ‘Come with me, both of you.’

  Rosa Rabinowicz suggested they move to a corner of the block that was, at least temporarily, less crowded and that Hannah keep watch while she talked to Estusia, explaining that what she had to say was of the utmost importance and needed to be kept secret.

  Rosa spoke almost in a whisper. ‘What do you know about the resistance?’

  ‘What do you mean “resistance”?’ Estusia asked.

  Estusia Weiss had every right to find it difficult to believe that any resistance movement existed in Auschwitz, a place where daily she saw people she was housed with die on their bunks or drop dead where they stood in front of her during the Appel, a place where, day and night, transports of newly arrived people, nearly all Jews, were gassed and cremated in their thousands, the smoke and the unmistakable smell from the crematoria chimneys filling the sky and the air. But when Rosa explained that not only was there a resistance movement within the camp but that its members wanted her and her colleagues at the Weichsel Union Metallwerke factory to assist them, Estusia felt stirrings entirely alien to most inmates in the camp. To learn that there were prisoners, Jewish prisoners too, who were planning to sabotage the killing process, to fight back, to attempt escape, was to experience something akin to a religious revelation. Perhaps someone would survive all of this. Perhaps the world might get to know even a tenth of what had gone on there. Despite the risk, she needed no convincing to join them and she was certain that some if not all of the other Jewish girls of the Pulverraum also would. She pointed at one of them, her friend Ala, who she was sure could be counted on.

  It was arranged that Rosa would make regular visits to the block housing Estusia and Hannah Weiss using goods from Kanada as bribes wherever necessary to facilitate entry and egress. There she would receive the tiny packages of gunpowder and see that they were delivered to the resistance within the Sonderkommando.

  How they would get the gunpowder out of the factory was still to be worked out.

  The woman Rosa had seen lying shaking with fever had died by the time she walked back out of the block. Nobody had noticed. Within twelve hours she would be on a pile of corpses that Zalman Gradowski would burn with the transport of Jews that would arrive after the transport that was arriving now.

  The stratagem they used to get the gunpowder out of the factory and into their block was devised by Estusia together with her fifteen-year-old sister Hannah and their friend and fellow Pulverraum worker, Ala. Only four women at a time and Regina, their supervisor, worked in the Pulverraum. All of them were Jews. Hannah was one of a group of prisoners assigned to maintenance in the factory. The women of the Pulverraum used presses to insert measured amounts of gunpowder into shell components that were delivered to them from somewhere else in the factory. The number and location of these munitions components were constantly checked by the Germans and there was no way any of these shells could be smuggled out of the Pulverraum. It was Hannah who thought of utilising the garbage collection system for smuggling out just the gunpowder. There were numerous small metal boxes throughout the factory for the purpose of collecting garbage to be emptied into large garbage bins that lined the walls and the corners of the factory. Prisoners in Hannah’s group were variously given the task of sweeping the floor of a section and emptying the small metal boxes as well as the piles of swept garbage into the large garbage bins.

  Hannah took it upon herself to convince the German civilian forewoman that she was required to regularly collect the small metal boxes in the Pulverraum containing garbage, empty them into the big bins in the factory, and then bring them back filled with strips of cloth from other parts of the factory for emptying into a big bin in the Pulverraum. It was in these small pieces of cloth that Estusia and Ala and later others, including Regina, would wrap and knot tiny quantities of gunpowder that they would drop into the returned small metal boxes. Hannah would make her rounds with an air of confidence that suggested to anyone watching her that somebody in authority must have ordered her to do this. She would always come and then leave the Pulverraum with two of the smaller metal boxes. One would be legitimate; the other would be used in the smuggling, either to deliver the cloth strips to Estusia and Ala for them to wrap the gunpowder in, or else to collect the wrapped gunpowder. Once Hannah had the tiny cloth packages of gunpowder she would distribute them to a few trusted colleagues who worked with her.

  None of the Pulverraum workers themselves ever left the factory with gunpowder on them. It was Hannah and her colleagues in other sections of the Metallwerke factory who carried the cloth parcels, which they hid in their clothes, back into their barracks block in the women’s camp in Auschwitz I. Their practice at the end of each shift was to position themselves in the middle of the formation of prisoners returning to their barracks in the camp so that in the event of one of the random searches by the SS they would have valuable seconds in which to untie the cloth parcels and empty the gunpowder onto the ground before they were reached. But in the normal course of events, the gunpowder parcels were picked up from Estusia and Hannah’s block by Rosa and, later, another female prisoner from Kanada. From Kanada they could be picked up by members of t
he Sonderkommando when they were delivering the belongings of the freshly gassed transports. Every person involved knew the danger they were putting themselves in. But death there was certain. Only the way it came to you was not. And when.

  *

  When the Co-op City Express bus arrived at its final stop from Manhattan there were only three passengers still on it. The last one to get off was Lamont Williams. He had fallen asleep somewhere around 120th Street after another long day at work. He would have remained asleep on the bus had the driver not called out to wake him. Lamont was not more than two steps away from the bus when it pulled away from the kerb. The driver was in a hurry. It was dark, and since the other two passengers were already inside their respective buildings, Lamont started on his way home in what looked to be a deserted street. He didn’t see anyone else around until suddenly he felt a man’s forearm holding him around his collar bone and the blade of a knife against his neck. ‘Don’t turn around,’ said a voice.

  Instinctively, he turned his head slowly to see who was attacking him.

  ‘Don’t move,’ said the voice.

  From the little Lamont had been able to see there was only one person, a man wearing gloves and a balaclava under a hoody. Judging by his voice, the man was African American.

  ‘Listen, man,’ said Lamont, ‘I ain’t got no money and this whole place is crawlin’ with cameras so you gotta ask yourself if this really what you wanna be doin’.’

  ‘This ain’t about money,’ said the voice.

  ‘I ain’t got no drugs, no weapons neither. So you got yourself the wrong man.’