Florian's Gate

by T. Davis Bunn

  “It was not a licensed market, so many sharp city people would wait there to take advantage of people coming in from the countryside, looking for wares they could not find in their villages. For example, a man would stand with one shoe held high up over his head until someone came by and asked how much for it. He would perhaps reply, two hundred zloty. They would bargain, and settle on maybe one hundred and fifty, the man would ask for the money, then hand over the one shoe. The country fellow would ask for the other shoe, and the man would say, ah, you want to buy two? Why didn’t you say so? That will be another hundred and fifty zloty. A lot of small-time shysters like that operated around the gate. I suppose that was why the Nazis chose this place to make one of their sweeps.”

  They arrived at the looming metal gates. Jeffrey paused to look down the gravel path running between double rows of fencing and concrete pylons. He stood there a moment, willing himself to turn to steel, harden himself against whatever awaited him inside. Then they entered.

  To his left were several red-brick barracks. To his right was the wood and brick camp kitchen. The camp itself was neat and orderly and incredibly silent given the number of people walking the paths. The loudest sound was that of wind rustling in the tall trees. Jeffrey walked the rock-lined path and felt grateful for Alexander’s droning voice. Otherwise the silence might have smothered him.

  “That particular morning, as the trams approached that side of town, they were being stopped by the German police—the Schutzpolizei, not the Gestapo. It was the first time this had happened in the city, the very first time. Eventually the Polish people came to call such sweeps by the name of Lapanka, the trap. But that morning it was too new, and there was no name. All we knew was that the tram was stopped and we were forced to get off.”

  The renovated prison blocks were red-brick two-story, utterly featureless constructions. Jeffrey followed Alexander’s lead and stopped in front of one labeled Block 4—Extermination Exhibit. As he climbed the stairs with Alexander, he imagined the walls to be weeping blood.

  “They started checking documents,” Alexander continued, leading them down a bare whitewashed corridor. “I had documents, not real documents, saying that I was a gardener’s helper. Documents saying one had work were most important. They looked at them and told me to step aside, along with several dozen other men. A few minutes later these covered trucks arrived and we were loaded up. We were not told anything, nothing at all. Not where we were going, or why we were selected, or how long we would be away. Nothing.”

  The first room showed wall-sized black-and-white photographs of the transport story, remarkably clear in their frozen portrayal of agony on one side and stiff military indifference on the other. Trains expelled masses of people; children stared with frozen fear at the camera, or were hustled through barbed-wire gates, or clung to their mothers’ skirts, or wailed in timeless terror.

  Alexander walked beside him, viewing everything, seeing nothing. “I cannot say I was particularly scared. Age certainly had something to do with it. I was sixteen at the time, you see, and at that age your own death is something quite difficult to imagine. It is very hard to look further than that day, or that week, to what might lie beyond, or what might be on other people’s minds.”

  The next barracks greeted them with a sign that said in French, Russian, Polish and English: This barracks houses all that remained of the victims’ belongings and was found after the camp’s liberation. Jeffrey entered the first room, and found himself facing a wall of glass. Beyond it stretched forty feet of brushes. Shaving brushes. Hairbrushes. Shoebrushes. Toothbrushes.

  “We were first taken to old Polish military barracks near the city,” Alexander went on in his ceaseless drone. “On the way, I wrote a note to my mother on a scrap of paper, putting down her address and saying what had happened, that I was taken by the Germans and I didn’t know where I was going or why, but that I would try to let her know. I threw three or four of them out from beneath the canvas covering on the truck, and the remarkable thing is that my mother received every one of them. I learned later that people picked them up, read the address I had scribbled, and took them to my mother. Every single one. When we left the barracks and were taken by trucks to the railroad station, I wrote several more, just dropping them outside the truck on the road. Again she got every single one.”

  In the next room was another glass wall with yet another pile, this one of metal bowls. Thousands and thousands and thousands of bowls.

  Another room, another glass wall, another display—this one of crutches and prosthetic limbs and back braces. A wooden hand made for a child, with fingers perhaps two inches long, reached out to Jeffrey across the years.

  “At the station they put sixty or seventy of us into a cattle car. At that time they weren’t taking women to Auschwitz, only men. We had one container with water, and another for waste, with straw on the floor. It was a most unpleasant voyage. It was extremely crowded, and it stank horribly. There were Germans with machine-gun placements on the roofs of each car, and every time we came to a crossing where the train stopped, some people would try to escape. The Germans would machine-gun them, then go out and pick up their bodies and throw them back into the cattle cars with the rest of us.”

  Upstairs there were no rooms, just one long hall with glass walls to either side. Half of the entire floor was filled with shoes. Men’s, women’s, children’s, babies’ shoes—piled to the ceiling in a broken array of lost possessions and lost lives.

  “We arrived at Auschwitz on August 15, 1940,” Alexander continued. “They divided us up into rows of five and began marching us toward the camp. At that time there was only the one camp. Birkenau had not even been started yet. So we were marched across to the main camp, and through this big iron gate. Above the gate was written in big iron letters the words Arbeit Macht Frei—‘Work makes you free.’ So all of us thought we had been conscripted for a labor camp. It was still early enough that the truth about Auschwitz was not yet publicly known, you see. Perhaps there were rumors floating around, but they had not made their way down to the ears of a sixteen-year-old boy. Or to my fellows, for that matter. It did not even occur to us that we were being brought into an extermination camp.”

  The second floor’s other half was given over to suitcases, turned upward to shout the names of those unable to claim them. Frank of Holland. Birmann of Hamburg. Ludwig of Baruch, Israel. Eva Pander of Recklinghausen. Gescheit of Berlin. Else Meier of Cologne. Helene Lewandowski of Poland.

  “So they brought us into this central square. I suppose our transport held fifteen or sixteen hundred people. It took a very long time for them to process us. We had to go to one place where we had to leave all our clothing. Everything. Then to another place where they shaved us completely. Our heads, our bodies, everything. Then we were forced to bathe, and then given these Auschwitz pajamas. That is what I thought of them, those striped camp suits. We were left barefoot.”

  At the end of the chamber, diagonal to the suitcases, was a deep narrow display of baby clothing. Jeffrey simply had to turn away.

  “Already some pretty terrible things were happening right there and then on the square. It appeared that the Germans wanted to see how people reacted to various situations. We had not eaten for twenty-four hours. So what they did was set out twenty or thirty large loaves of bread, heavy Polish bread, and then tell the people to come forward and take some. But every time people stepped forward, the Germans with their heavy boots and guns would beat them. The soldiers were laughing and joking as they did so, treating it as great sport. Still, because the people were so hungry, some would try to grab a handful, and they were beaten very badly.”

  Another downstairs room had two glass walls. One displayed Jewish prayer shawls hung from wooden frames whose outstretched fabric cried for attention. The second held a cobwebbed mass of eyeglasses, their thousands of lenses gathered in the case’s forefront to peer silently into Jeffrey’s aching heart.

  “The water
inside the train car had been used up in the first two hours, and afterward we had nothing more. While we were out there on the square, an elderly man was coughing very badly. Somehow he managed to get a soldier to bring him a full bucket of water, and for this he gave the German his gold pocket watch—this was before he had been stripped, of course. When we were stripped all valuables were taken from us. So the old man drank his fill, and then turned to us and said, anyone who wants can have some. But when we looked we saw that the old man, who had TB, had left the water scummy with coughed-up blood. Even so, many drank from that bucket—that is how thirsty they had become.”

  Upon their exit from the building, Jeffrey turned to read the name above the door. It said: Block 5—Evidence of Crimes.

  “While the processing was taking place, the Germans brought forward a prisoner who had arrived earlier,” Alexander continued as they walked toward the next barrack. “I suppose there were already thirteen or fourteen hundred prisoners there when we arrived. They had been there three or four months, from what I gathered later. Auschwitz had formerly been a Polish army camp, and when the Germans arrived they began gathering people from prisons around Cracow and sending them there. The soldiers brought out this prisoner with his harmonica, and from our group they brought out a Catholic priest and a Jewish rabbi. These men were tired, and hungry, and the rabbi with his long beard could barely stand up. They gave them a sheet of paper and told them to sing the words while the prisoner played the harmonica. The words were very obscene; these holy men stood there, forced to sing obscenities, while the guards listened and laughed.”

  Block 6 was titled Prisoners’ Life. In the first hall, black-and-white etchings by former inmates loomed over display cases of passports and family photographs and personal documents. The pictures required no explanation—S.S. soldiers stripping newly arrived inmates of rings, Kapo guards pulling an inmate from line for a beating, new prisoners adding to a mountain of suitcases outside their barrack, prisoners being selected for experimentation.

  “At the end of the processing they gave us each a number. My number was one-nine-one-four, neunzehn-vierzehn. We were told that if a German or a Kapo came up, we were to stand at attention and recite, Politische Schutzhäftling, Pole, neunzehn-vierzehn, meldet heir zur Stelle.”

  Across from the etchings, against a backdrop of barbed wire, a wall display shouted in red letters a foot high the command: A Jew is permitted one week to live, a priest two, anyone else a maximum of three months.

  Alexander examined the display with eyes blind to all but his memories. “There were already a hundred or so Jews here when we arrived. The Germans put them into what was called the Straff company. The penalty company. These people had it very, very bad. They were forced to haul this enormous roller around and around the square, while the Germans continually beat them. It was a horrible thing to watch. Horrible.”

  The barrack’s central hallway was about seventy feet long and lined on both sides with three rows of photographs. Men were to the right, women the left. Beneath the pictures were written their number, their name, their date of birth, their former profession. Jeffrey made out the words for tour guide, teacher, sailor, waiter, lawyer, priest, religious brother, chemist. Beneath the profession was their date of arrival and their date of death.

  Their eyes. Their eyes. Jeffrey felt their eyes searching him even when he walked the hall with his own gaze remaining on his feet.

  “Every day we were gathered on the central square where they made us go through these extremely difficult, pointless physical exercises. We were already growing weak, and whenever anyone stumbled the Germans would immediately begin beating him. One Kapo hit me over the head with his stick, here, I can still feel the place. The Kapos at that time were all German. We were told that they were criminal prisoners, and under them the men in charge of the barracks rooms were Polish criminals. I can still remember the man in charge of my barracks, a big man, very big, of perhaps forty-five years and completely bald. His number was four hundred. He carried this great stick with him always, and beat on us constantly.”

  At the back of the central hall stood a tall sculpture. It showed six women whose rags covered their heads and little else. They were nothing more than taut skin and staring eyes and jutting bones. The sculpture was entitled Hunger.

  Alexander remained before the statue for quite a long while. “Our normal ration was a soup called Avo for lunch, a blackish mixture with perhaps a couple of rotten potatoes. Nothing for breakfast. At night there was so-called tea, water boiled with some unknown leaves, and hard, moldy bread. Bread was the common currency at Auschwitz, bread and cigarettes. The exchange rate was three or four cigarettes for a hunk of bread. People who really craved tobacco would exchange it, knowing full well that they couldn’t last without food, and not really caring all that much. For some, the hunger for cigarettes was stronger than for food, especially as life lost its meaning. Then, when someone smoked a cigarette, they would inhale and then blow the smoke into the mouth of a friend. He would in turn blow it into the mouth of a third man.”

  One room was dedicated to children. Jeffrey refused to enter. Alexander stopped a few paces inside, turned back with a look of addled confusion, then shrugged his accord and led them down the hall, out of the building, and on to the next barrack. The sign above the door announced that it held a display of how prisoners lived.

  “In our barracks room there were one hundred and seventy men,” Alexander told him as they entered. “It was so tight that we were forced to sleep on our sides, and when one turned, all were forced to turn with him. No beds. We were sleeping on the floor, with only straw between us and the concrete floor. In the mornings we were kicked and beaten outside to the hand pump, where we were supposed to have our only wash of the day. One hundred and seventy men around a hand pump, with the Kapos beating us to make us hurry.

  “One time I was late, maybe five minutes late coming out of the barracks. The Kapo marked my number, and about two weeks later a Gestapo soldier came up and called out five or six numbers, mine being one of them. We were penalized because we had been late coming out of the barracks. The punishment was something terrible. He stood there in the concrete corridor inside our barracks with a horsewhip and ordered us through truly horrible gymnastics for over two hours. Whenever we stumbled we were kicked and whipped until we were unconscious. One of the five men punished with me was killed, murdered, beaten to death right there before our eyes. I received one kick in the small of my back, on my kidneys, that I truly thought had killed me too.”

  Inside the barracks the central hall held two more walls of eyes. Jeffrey checked the professions in an attempt to escape the stares—seamstress, mayor, bureaucrat, blacksmith, activist. The wall opened for a doorway that framed a brick-sided barracks room as it was in 1944. Straw was laid beneath blanket rags. Three tiers of wooden beds rose like animal stalls in a room less than six feet high. The stalls were perhaps four feet wide. A sign by the doorway said that eight women slept in each of the four-foot-wide tiers. A thousand women to a barrack.

  “After a time,” Alexander said beside him, “they began marching us a mile or so every morning to the building site of Birkenau. This was the second stage of the Auschwitz death camp, and the larger one. I was ordered up on top of very steep roofs—I don’t know what they had been before they were turned into Birkenau—and I cleaned them with a stiff wire brush. It was extremely steep, very dangerous work. One day a man working beside me fell to his death.”

  Block 10 was closed and the door barred. Beside the door a sign read: In this block the German physician, Professor Clauberg M.D., conducted experiments dealing with the sterilization of women. Three women knelt on the steps and prayed, candles lit before them.

  “One morning while at work at Birkenau I happened upon some rotten potatoes. You must understand that by that time hunger was a ruling force in my life. It dominated my daily existence. Several of us there together swiftly gathered them up. It was a
pproaching winter by that time, so we took these potatoes and put them on a fire there at the work site. While we were watching them, a German came up. All the others fled, but I was caught, and the German demanded to know who they were, these others who had been cooking potatoes instead of working. When I refused to tell him, he sent a Kapo to fetch him a special stick. It was very heavy, almost as thick as my forearm, and had nails hammered into it to give it extra weight. He ordered the Kapo to take my head between his legs, and then he began to beat me on my back and thighs. I was supposed to get twenty-five blows. On the eighth stroke he hit me on the kidneys, and I lost consciousness.”

  Beside Block 10, metal gates opened to a graveled courtyard. At its end was a bullet-ridden concrete wall, the Death Wall. Row after row of flowers and candles and wreaths and cards were set at its base.

  “Every day, sometimes several times a day, they would tie a man’s hands behind his back, and pull him upward on a tall post until his feet left the ground, suspended with his arms pulled back and up from behind. They were left hanging for two, sometimes three hours. The pain was indescribable. People who went through it told me afterward that they would rather die than endure it again.”

  The neighboring block contained a large room with a line of simple wooden tables. A sign described it as the camp court, and said that almost all who were tried here were executed. Immediately.

  Two opposing rooms were assigned for male and female prisoners to strip naked before being led outside to be shot. The sign above the men’s chamber said that most had their hands bound with barbed wire.