Sunrise West

by Jacob G. Rosenberg

  ‘Drop down wherever you’re standing, and freeze!’ our block-eldest had shouted. We obeyed. No sooner had he left than the barrack was filled with a voiceless questioning and the sound of sobbing. Shortly a figure stood up in the near-darkness and moved its arms about its head and shoulders in an eerie pantomime — the figure was robing itself in an imaginary prayer-shawl. It sat down again, then whispered: ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who hast sanctified us with Thy commandments, and commanded us to enwrap ourselves in the fringed garment.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Raymond, quite audibly. ‘Doesn’t our Almighty know that at this very moment our holy robes are swaddling the shitty bottoms of thousands of Christian infants?’

  ‘You’re being un-Jewish, Jew, it’s Yom Kippur,’ an inmate muttered angrily under his breath. Raymond said no more.

  After a moment, a subdued prayer came from where the shadowy figure was sitting: ‘Al daas hamokom ve al daas ha-kohol, biyeshivoh shel ma’loh, uviyeshivoh shel matoh... With the sanction of the Omnipresent and with the sanction of the congregation, by the authority of the heavenly tribunal and by the authority of the earthly tribunal, we hereby grant permission to pray with those who have transgressed.’

  Then the figure began to chant the Kol Nidre.

  I glanced over at Raymond, noticed the quiver on his thin white lips. There were tears in his eyes.

  The SS Blockführer leapt into the barrack like a man who has taken leave of his senses. ‘Sau Juden! Unthankful swine!’ he screamed. ‘I ordered you to freeze, yet you’re chanting your black-magic chants. You, the rotten soloist, whoever you are — come forward at once. If not, all of you are doomed!’

  The tension lasted only a second or two. Then, as if from a cloud, a dim phantom of a man arose — the shadowy figure that had been leading our spontaneous service. Although I couldn’t see his face, I had recognized him by his voice: it was Laibl, the pious cantor from the cobblers’ synagogue in my city of the waterless river. Rysiek, who was always at the side of his superior, only had to hit Laibl once. Giggling to himself, he picked up the heavy-duty hose that was attached to our barrack tap and turned it on.

  All that night we lay on the cold cement floor in a pool of water, as we’d been ordered to do. At the ominous sound of the 4.30 gong we got up and rushed out to be counted, before being forced to endure a half-hour of rapid squatting and standing.

  A crispy calcium air hovered about the camp on that Yom Kippur morning. After a night of lying in freezing water, two men seeking a shred of warmth found each other’s back. Soon others did likewise, and before long a broad cluster of stalks — a strange human sheaf — stood in the space between barrack and barrack, and a little apart from the rest of us. As the warmth seeped through these prisoners’ bones, the sheaf began to murmur a Yiddish tune, its words penned by the poet Avraham Reisen:

  Dance, rejoice, crazy winds,

  This is your golden time;

  Long will this cruel winter last,

  And your heinous crime.

  Rend the shutters from the windows,

  Smash the windowpanes;

  Somewhere a candle flickers dimly,

  Snuff it without shame.

  Drive the birds from the forests,

  Scatter them with wrath;

  Those who cannot fly the distance

  Murder on the spot.

  The camp authorities quickly got wind of this dangerous rebellion and within no time the whole assembly was surrounded by a ring of bludgeon-wielding kapos. The offending group, the human sheaf, was marched off, never to be seen again.

  An eerie silence enfolded the barrack as our Blockführer, who before turning criminal had allegedly studied Roman history, stomped in. He was drunk.

  ‘I must know the meaning of that song,’ he announced. ‘The one sung yesterday by those Jews who are now facing their Maker... Hey you!’ he shrilled at a man who stood out a little from the crowd, ‘tell us what message your song carried.’

  ‘Sadness, Herr Blockführer, only sadness.’

  A deft punch from Rysiek felled the man. The historian stood with one foot on his body, like a victor of old. ‘Sau Juden! Not the Visigoths, not the Vandals,’ he fumed, ‘but your contagious sadness — your Jüdischer Demut — was what destroyed the Roman Empire. Well, that will not work with us, it will not work with us!’ And he stood back, as if to deliver a soliloquy.

  ‘Your God promised to make your offspring as numerous as the dust of the earth,’ he declared, now citing Genesis, ‘so that if one could count the dust of the earth, thus would your offspring too be counted. But we have proved that your God was only partly correct. You are dust, yes, but remember — we will count you and count you, until there is nothing left of you to be counted!’

  Rudolf’s Silver Spoon

  O simple spoon, your greatness can be valued only by a man who has been forced to sup like a dog from one plate with four other starved men.

  A few weeks before the Jews from the city of the waterless river were brought to Birkenau, the Germans, to the lively strains of the camp orchestra, exterminated thousands of gypsies in a single night. A youngster from Frankfurt am Main, a denizen of the Lager since its inception and known as Rudolf the Mad, dubbed the event ‘Johann Strauss’s Waltz of Death’:

  ‘Ein Zwei Drei, Ein Zwei Drei,

  Dear Lady Death, come another day.

  There is no escape from your eager hand,

  For this is Germany’s nightmare land.’

  Rudolf, who on account of his beautiful Aryan mother had reputedly (as the bitter jokesters had it) been driven to camp in a Mercedes limousine, could not push that killing spree from his mind. ‘Not only can I still smell the gypsies’ sweat from the crematorium chimney,’ he would tell us, ‘but I can hear their sad melodies in the buzz of the electric fence.’

  One day he said to me, ‘You know, the authorities wanted to certify me, but my uncle Kurt, who was high up in the SS, argued that I was too crazy to be locked up!’

  Encouraged by my chuckle, he continued in a more serious vein: ‘I’ll never forget the morning the Gestapo arrested my father, who was a professor of sociology and a member of the Spartacus party — a Jew, yet more German than Bismarck. They apprehended him for composing an innocent little ditty:

  Everything is transient

  All things pass away,

  First goes the Führer

  Then his big lie.

  ‘They said to my mother, who loved him dearly, “We’re taking him away to be re-educated, he’ll be back soon.” Three months later we received father’s death certificate, and his clothes. The messenger wouldn’t hand over the tiny urn with his ashes until mother agreed to share a schnapps with him. “Well,” he told her, clearly a cultured man, “did Priam not succumb to Achilles’ request that he should eat and rest before taking away the body of his slain son, Hector?”’

  Despite Raymond’s reservations, I was fond of Rudolf — though his sayings were so dangerously outlandish that they placed not only him but his listener in jeopardy. ‘Meine Herren, noble slaves,’ he announced on one occasion, ‘no ruler can reign without the approval, or at least the acquiescence, of the people!’ No wonder they called him mad.

  Perhaps again by virtue of his beautiful mother, and probably of his uncle Kurt’s position in the service, Rudolf was admitted into the coveted ‘Canada’ block of the camp, so called presumably because, in a place where gas chambers were a way of life, where people died en masse from hunger, those in ‘Canada’ — who collected the possessions of all new arrivals, and worked in the gas chambers and crematoria — lacked few necessities. After a while, though, no doubt because they had seen and knew too much, most of them were also included in the Final Solution.

  Thanks to Rudolf, I became a frequent visitor to Block 1, that barrack of Birkenau’s privileged. One day I met two Frenchmen there who offered me a loaf of bread if I could provide them with a blanket from among those consigned the night
before to the inmates of Block 8 (blankets being one necessity ‘Canada’ was short of). Next morning I stealthily brought the merchandise; to avoid suspicion I pretended to be dusting it. But when Rudolf saw me making the exchange he jumped at the two fellows.

  ‘Murderers, thieves, ill-begotten scum!’ he cursed them. ‘Do you know what you have done? He could have been hanged for that!’

  ‘But he wasn’t, was he!’ they retorted cynically. ‘And who are you to judge us, Crazy Man?’

  ‘Chaff will wither,’ said Rudolf, throwing back one of his mad lines. He took me aside. ‘Look, friend, you’re not going to last at this rate. You have no number on your arm, which means that you’re just being kept in stock. As soon as there’s a shortage of fuel to keep the furnaces going, you’ll be it.

  ‘I’ve heard a rumour,’ he persisted, dropping his voice. ‘Tomorrow a delegation will be arriving at the camp. They’ll be looking for slave-labour.’ He handed me a red lipstick. ‘Make sure you’re looking good.’

  After evening roll-call we were all transferred back to Block 5, and the following noon, under the gaze of three well-fed merchants, we stood in front of the barrack completely naked, staring at these gods of life and death. The whole proceeding lasted an hour, and was uncannily reminiscent of scenes I could recall from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  Raymond and I were among the ones chosen. I distinctly heard Romek mutter (I didn’t imagine it), ‘Good luck, boys!’ Soon curfew was imposed; after curfew, contact with any other inmates outside the barrack meant death. Even so, Rudolf managed to get in, and when we embraced he squeezed a silver-plated spoon into my hand. ‘Have it for luck,’ he said. ‘It still carries the aroma of my Jewish grandmother’s cooking. It’s a very fortunate old silver spoon.’

  He pointed to a tiny inscription engraved on the spoon. ‘Promise and Exile,’ he whispered, pronouncing the message with passion. Then, like a fading vision, he slowly retreated into a crevice in the barrack wall, to merge into the grim ether of Birkenau’s night.

  The Library of Imagination

  Raymond and I were among the 180 lucky slaves sold or donated by the camp authorities to a German roadmaking company.

  I clearly remember that sunny autumn morning of our departure from Auschwitz-Birkenau — sixty slaves to a wagon, and at the end of each wagon a concealed steel enclosure that aroused our suspicions. How did we know that this wasn’t a gas container, some of us argued. ‘They’re not to be trusted,’ Raymond muttered. ‘We shouldn’t forget for even one moment that this world is governed by a gang of criminals with a criminal ideology, inventors of novel methods of murder.’ He went over to investigate but returned with a smile: the enclosure turned out to be a toilet.

  We travelled for hours deep into the heart of a mountainous terrain. The wagon’s huge shutters were wide open, our young German guard sat on a chair (the only chair) looking bored, leaning on his gun. As the day aged, an unwelcome chilly white fog enveloped the train: ‘We’ve run in such panic from the advancing Russians,’ the guard complained (what music to our ears!), ‘that I didn’t even have time to pick up my winter coat. I’ll never forgive them that.’

  The train moved at a soothing pace, passing through a panorama of forests, fields and well-cultivated orchards. How oblivious, I thought, was this beautiful landscape to war, to human pain. Perhaps it was the momentary tranquillity which made me mention something about my mother’s incurable love for nature. Raymond cautioned me. ‘Don’t, friend! Don’t even try to think of the past. You can cry later, much later. Start now, and soon there’ll be one voice less to testify to what we’ve witnessed.’

  ‘What do you reckon about Rudolf?’ I asked. ‘And how do you understand the inscription on the spoon he gave me? Promise and Exile.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘There’s something strange about that young fellow. I can’t really work him out, his brashness in the face of danger. But the engraving on the spoon — it has a definite biblical echo.’

  Raymond adjusted his position (we were lying on the floor). ‘I read a story somewhere about Moses,’ he went on. ‘When his people, whom he had led out of Egypt, chose religion over God and made a golden calf, the Almighty was angry and wanted to destroy these idol-worshippers — but Moses interceded on their behalf, so God spared them and made of Moses a great and powerful nation. Its inhabitants are reputed to have dwelt beyond the river Sabatyon, so called because on weekdays it flowed with a furious current, but on the Sabbath it came to a standstill. And there, as the story goes, Moses instructed one of his poet-architects to build the Library of Imagination.’

  Raymond smiled mysteriously, as if he had forgotten the purpose of our journey. He was clearly enjoying his tale.

  ‘The library had a vaulted roof of blue ivory, and was lined with massive shelves. Every book was bound in black leather, with pure gold emblazoned on its spine. And one of these books contained a startling revelation. The calf had not been the Chosen People’s first act of defiance against their Master, for there had once occurred a far more sinister rebellion. You see, Adam was expelled from Paradise not for eating the apple, but for tipping off the Jews about what lay in store for them! Because of this, the Jews refused to be created. God was beside Himself — to whom would he now entrust His holy Torah?

  ‘He was forced to offer a stupendous promise, which the Jews gullibly accepted. How were they to know that at the heart of this promise lay an everlasting exile?’

  The Potemkin Affair

  The train stopped at a small station. Dressed in our striped prisoners’ uniforms and surrounded by a squad of armed soldiers, we were marched three abreast through the main street of the township. The sergeant in charge kept warning passers-by to ‘stay away from these typhus-infested criminals’.

  It was almost dusk. Men in tweed coats, their eyes turned inwards, kept rushing past, presumably on their way home from work. Young women with small fair-headed children gazed at us in bewilderment from curtained windows. Chimney smoke above the terracotta roofs carried the aroma of delicious cooking.

  ‘A Potemkin scene,’ I said to Raymond. ‘It’s all a lie, it cannot be.’ Grigori Potemkin was a Russian field-marshal with a legendary reputation for creating illusions. It was said that he had fake villages constructed to fool his empress, Catherine the Great, on her tour of the Crimea in 1787.

  ‘No,’ answered Raymond, ‘what you see is not a mirage. It’s just that our enemy has succeeded in making us forget the peacefulness of normal family existence.’

  The camp lay on the very outskirts of the township. We were welcomed by a group of Jewish men; these were the block-eldest. ‘Have no fear, boys,’ they told us, ‘you’ve arrived in Jerusalem.’ And to our amazement, after hot thick soup and a slice of corn-bread we were shown to our bunks — which were covered with real blankets! Raymond took the bunk above mine and I heard him drop heavily onto his straw sack.

  Our Lagerführer was a tall, imposing man in his midfifties who walked about the camp with a smile on his face. And although it can be hard to assess the character of an incessantly smiling person, we believed that this German, who spoke to us with effortless ease, was a genuine human being.

  At morning roll-call, when we were counted, he announced that fifteen youngsters who had travelled with us, after somehow miraculously managing to escape death selection at Auschwitz, had permission to enter the kitchen whenever they were hungry. Raymond took a great interest in this young group; perhaps the teacher in him had been awoken again. On one occasion I overheard him summon his last drop of optimism as he told one of them: ‘The war will soon be over. Remember, not all Germans are evil. Hold on to your humanity at all cost.’

  I still recall the strange foreboding aura of that bright Friday afternoon in October when the open army truck rolled confidently into our camp to collect its silent harvest. It took only a few minutes for the fifteen youngsters to be loaded aboard — for the journey back to Birkenau and the fate Germany had bestowed upon
them.

  Soon afterwards we had to leave our Jerusalem. There were no clouds of the Lord resting on us by day, and no fiery columns by night, as we were marched on a muddy track towards a new Egypt. For a long stretch of time we walked enveloped in muteness. At last Raymond spoke.

  ‘Men who have spent years in captivity can be surprisingly gullible,’ he remarked, ‘yet at the same time tremendously suspicious. But I dare to hope, if only for God’s sake,’ said this incurable mocker of religion, ‘that our Lagerführer had nothing to do with sending those kids back to Auschwitz. And that his perpetual smile was a genuine reflection of his nature, not just a well-rehearsed Potemkin production.’

  Wolfsburg

  As we entered the gates of Wolfsburg, I realized with shame that the camp’s taskmasters were drawn from among my own. They at once gave us to understand that this would be no Jerusalem, that we had re-entered Egypt, that we were to slave under their strict supervision. Then, after a thorough physical (that is, a severe roughing-up), we were told the happy news: ‘Lucky bastards, you’re now the property of Heinrich Butzer, the most prestigious road-building company in the whole Reich!’ Our job was to fill in the valley between the mountains of Pithom and Raamses.

  ‘And you should understand,’ added one of the leading taskmasters, ‘that the traditional welcome you just received is only to make you aware that this is not the holiday resort you came from, but a working camp. Rest assured that we know how to deal with malingerers.’

  We were warned that since the beginning of time, daylight in these parts had suffered from an abrupt death. As the clouds of evening descended on our camp like a sudden flock of dishevelled witches, I asked Raymond: ‘Why the cruelty? Why are these muggers our own?’ Of course I remembered well the brutality of the Jewish police in the ghetto, and of the kapos at Auschwitz-Birkenau. ‘Did our friendly reception in Jerusalem cloud my mind with delusions?’