Every day I went to bed and woke up alive, and every day I marched off to work and returned to my block walking and not limping, was a blessing. I stopped noticing my surroundings, finding it easier to look straight ahead with tunnel vision. In this way, I zoned out the chaos created by the guards that was wreaking havoc on my fellow prisoners. Walking over gravel, grass, dirt, and swampland, I no longer noticed the differences in the terrain. Inhaling the repulsive odor that poured out of the chimneys at all times, I breathed in without fighting it. Witnessing the brutality of the kapos and the SS, I tuned out the bloodcurdling cries. I recognized that I could not internalize everything around me. Doing so would break me.
Suffering from many bouts of sickness, I carefully avoided letting my dwindling health show so that I wasn’t carted away to the sick barracks. Every man had to fight for himself. Over time, I learned more about the inner workings of the camp, making me more capable of survival.
One lesson I learned was that the soup could vary from ice cold to bubbling hot from day to day. It was fine to gulp it down if it was cold; but after hungrily tipping my bowl back and having steaming liquid scald my throat and burn my skin as it ran down my chin, I recognized the need for a spoon. Having nothing to organize to obtain one, I scraped away at a piece of wood until I formed a primitive scooping utensil.
Similarly, I found that if I lined up for dinner towards the back of the line, I had a better chance of finding bits of vegetables in my soup. Other prisoners requested that the cooks dole out scoops from the bottom of the pot for them, but having tried this a few times on my own—only to receive lashings from guards who heard my “greedy” requests—I disbanded from using such tactics. I also began to tear apart excess material from my uniform as I became thinner and used it to fashion gloves and socks as an added barrier from the cold. I learned how to crouch down as I walked to and from work, gathering up handfuls of snow to eat. In fact, although the weather dipped down below 0° Celsius (less than 20° Fahrenheit) in the winter months, the snow helped to keep us from dehydrating. The summer months, with temperatures rising into the 30s (warmer than 90° Fahrenheit), were the times when water was so scarce that we came to look forward to our despicable coffee. My fellow prisoners and I suffered from heat stroke in conjunction with sheer exhaustion. The guards did not ease up on our expected work output, and so each day our labor groups dwindled as prisoners passed out from the heat and died or passed out and were killed, never to make it back to camp on their own accord. Meanwhile, our guards stood watching us beneath trees, shading themselves and their so-loved man-eating dogs from the sun. They openly drank refreshing beverages as they relaxed while we worked. It made me sick. During subfreezing workdays, they bundled up in down-lined parkas and thick, woolen hats and gloves, while we wore our second skin only—our scanty uniforms. We were like board game pieces to them; they moved us around at their amusement, sending us this way and that, while they reaped the benefits of our efforts.
CHAPTER 32
Nearly a year into my imprisonment, I discovered a way to utilize the skills my father had taught me during my apprenticeship. I was making my way back from dinner on a Sunday evening when I spotted a baby-faced guard nursing his ankles. His boots were lying on the table beside him so that the soles were facing me. The heels were uneven and there were holes in them. He glared at me, possibly out of shame or maybe to mask his pain. Automatically, I looked away. And then I made a risky decision: to talk to the guard and to tell him about my talent.
I knew I couldn’t safely approach him, so I pointed to his shoes and told him I could fix them if he’d let me. My conversation angered him; he ignored me. But I stayed where I was, convinced that he’d change his mind since he was obviously miserable. When he eventually did, he walked over to me and pulled me inside a nearby building. A deal was struck, and although I was unconfident that I could produce the results I had promised, I never let him know of my doubts. He had me follow him to his office a building or two over from where we were. Even though the other Germans who shared his office were gone for the night, he hid me in his closet until he returned with scraps of leather, tools, and the other materials I had requested to mend his boots. Frightened yet focused, I worked for several hours until I was sure that the semi-compassionate guard would be satisfied. When I showed him my handiwork he smiled but he also admonished me. “I’ll kill you if you tell anyone,” he cautioned.
And so I went to work for him and, as it turns out, I pleased him. He decided to have me fix shoes for a few other guards and for people in the neighboring town so that he could earn money from the deal. While I worked he snuck me small pieces of bread and sips of coffee. In fact, within a month, he allowed me to put leather patches on the insides of my useless clogs, which made them less abrasive and slightly warmer. My mangled feet thanked me. Even though I wasn’t supposed to share my secret, I of course told Mendel. I shoved extra bits of leather into my clogs and later used them to cushion Mendel’s shoes. When I was able to, I also brought him pieces of bread.
I eventually spent all of my free time, mainly Sundays, hidden away in a coat closet mending shoes. There were times when I swore I heard my father whispering in my ear, giving me advice to help me perfect my technique. I used what I had learned during my apprenticeship to guide me. While I had not been good at the trade before, I soon became proficient. The pressure to excel thrust me along.
This secret job of mine was a win-win for the guard and for me. That is, until a lioness of a woman found out and turned her sickening rage against me. This deceptively beautiful woman was named Irma Grese. Everyone in the camp knew her name. She was more feared than most of the SS men. In fact, she sometimes worked with Dr. Mengele—the man who had led the selections of our transport and conducted bizarre and cruel experiments on prisoners. She liked to wander through the camps stirring up trouble, scowling at us with her wicked eyes. She saw me take a pair of boots from the guard and so she approached me, accusing me of stealing shoes belonging to the SS. With her steel whip in hand, she lashed me across the face, grabbed the boots, and led me away. My nose and cheeks were hot with pain; the whip had sliced my skin like a knife. I tried to explain, but it was of no use. I didn’t know what method she would use to harm me. I wondered if she was going to hang me in the gallows, or take me between two blocks to the soundproofed “wall of death” space to execute me, or tie my hands behind my back and suspend me until I stopped breathing like so many others I had seen. I pleaded with her, not wanting my life to draw to a close. She pushed me into a truck and carted me a few kilometers to the main Auschwitz camp. Arriving at the entrance, I saw hanging above the gates large metal letters spelling the German words “Arbeit macht frei” which basically translates to “Work makes you free.” Reading the words, I knew that they were lies. Having been in the satellite Auschwitz-Birkenau camp for eighteen months by that point, I had worked just like everyone else and had come to realize that the more people worked the closer they came to death, not freedom.
Our truck finally stopped at a building labeled with the number 11. I was led inside and down into the basement where I could hear shrieks of agony rising up to greet me. In an instant, I was thrown into an unlit cell along with two other offenders and the grate door was closed behind us. With barely one square meter of cement floor space, we could not sit down or stand up. We were locked into what was known as a “punishment cell.” The other men didn’t speak Polish and so I wasn’t able to communicate with them. We received no food or water while we remained crouched; our knees buckled while we strained to hold ourselves up. Blood, vomit, and urine covered the unit from previous inhabitants, revealing to us that we might perish there. I could not determine when the sunlight gave way to the moonlight as the hours went by. With nothing to do, boredom engulfed me, causing my head to spin. My senses had nothing to stimulate them other than bodily odors and hair-raising screams from adjacent cells. We were enclosed in a prison within a prison. The three of us stared at each
other blankly. When would the madness end?
Crouching over, my mother’s ring—still attached to the string around my neck—popped out of my shirt. I grabbed it and tenderly tucked it back beneath my clothing, pausing for a second to rub it between my chest and fingers. As I did so, one of my mother’s poems from the ghetto came to mind, restoring my hope:
When I can’t see the sun shining,
I’ll devise a way to make my own light.
When I can’t feel the wind blowing,
I’ll find a way for my heart to take flight.
Only I have the power to control my mood—
And so everything negative I will exclude.
Reciting the poem to myself while enclosed in the damp space brought me a slight slice of happiness. It made me think about mother’s radiant demeanor and her unrelenting devotion to our family. She would have wanted me to make the best of my situation; she would have begged me to feign a smile. Despite how much I tried to pull the corners of my lips upwards, I couldn’t do it.
I was among the lucky few who spent only one day in the cell. The SS guard I had worked for arranged his own deal with Irma Grese. When he extracted me from the prison I fell, reduced to a lump of skin and bones. Shielding my eyes from the sunlight, he carried me into his truck and provided me with clean water and bread with butter—true luxuries that I had not seen in ages. I didn’t understand why he was so kind to me when all of the other guards were so nasty, but I supposed the war did not take away everyone’s humanity. Maybe he just saved me for my talent. Either way, my life had been spared. He took me back to camp and left me outside of my barracks. When Mendel saw me, alive and whole, he cried from relief. He thought I had been killed. Had I spent another day in the small, damp space and lived through it, I’m sure the experience would have caused me to go insane.
Surviving the confinement in the prison cell renewed my desire to keep fighting. I was determined to make it out of the camp so that after the war I could someday let the world know how atrocious the Germans had treated us.
CHAPTER 33
Each day spent in the camp brought about eye-opening experiences. Nazi doctors were involved in disturbing experiments on newborns and adults. I learned that Dr. Mengele pulled aside some of the children from the transports so that he could conduct gruesome medical tests on them. He was particularly interested in dwarfs and twins. It was a paradox because the children I saw—infrequently as that was—appeared to look up to Dr. Mengele; they swarmed to him like he was their father and he responded to them with gifts of chocolate and clothing. Did he love them or did he hate them?
From various sources I found out about the experiments Dr. Mengele conducted in the camp. What he did during the war was so deplorable, so sickening, that I can barely say his name without wincing. He doesn’t deserve the title “doctor”; he doesn’t even deserve to be called a human.
The “medical research” he performed didn’t benefit the medical community—it shamed it. He had a twisted fascination with people with distinctive hereditary traits. He injected chemicals into the eyes of prisoners to see if he could change their eye colors, causing infections and blindness. He sawed off limbs, collected bags of blood, conducted surgeries without anesthesia, and altered sexual organs. He left prisoners paralyzed, mutilated, and more often than not dead. Sometimes he kept children in cages to monitor how they would react to isolation. When he wanted to see what the anatomical differences would be between sets of twins who were experimented upon differently, he infected one twin with a disease and not the other and then he pumped phenol through their veins so that he could perform fresh autopsies. The list of barbaric acts he did goes on and on…
Even worse, however, is that Dr. Mengele wasn’t alone. There were other Nazi doctors in the camps who piggybacked on his research and conducted their own equally disturbing experiments.
But I can’t bring myself to talk about these doctors any further. I have to step away from this topic or my emotions would get the better of me.
Instead, let me tell you what else I learned over time about the camp:
When I met a prisoner who had recently been transferred from the main Auschwitz camp, he told me about a brothel for the guards’ enjoyment there. Female prisoners were coaxed into working in the windowless building. He told stories about the factories that employed prisoners from the main camp as well as another sub-camp called “Buna” that was located nearby. He explained how prisoners worked in plants that manufactured rubber, armaments, airplane engines, and so forth. The network of the camps was immense it seemed. The Germans had thought of all ways possible to squeeze every ounce of our strength into producing products and providing them with free labor. The last thing he said to me was eerily horrific. “They use the fat that boils out of burnt prisoners to make soap for our showers,” he said in a barely audible tone. Could this possibly be true? Given everything that I had seen, I knew that it could be.
I also learned that a large transport had arrived from a camp in Czechoslovakia called Theresienstadt. The members of this transport were allowed to live together as families. They were given the privilege of writing letters to their loved ones back home. At first I felt a sense of jealousy directed towards this group, but when I found out that all of these prisoners were gassed I revoked my feelings. I realized that the letters were dictated by the guards and were merely ploys to make their relatives believe that they were happy and healthy before they entered the chambers.
We feared taking a shower because we were told that some of the shower heads were rigged to pour out poison instead of water and the rare times when we were handed soap to use we feared that it was the fat of our fellow prisoners. We feared roll call because that was the time when groups of people were chosen to be gassed. We lived in a constant state of uncertainty, never knowing if our number on a list meant transfer to a new work detail or if it meant extermination. We feared standing still, sitting up, sleeping, working, and eating. Everything was dreadful. Nothing was predictable. Our kapos were mellow one day and wicked the next. Our bunkmates—the very people we shared the most intimate details of ourselves with—would steal our bread if we didn’t eat it before falling asleep.
Seeing death all around me, from the time I opened my eyes in the morning until I closed them at night, had become the routine. In order to mentally escape from this reality, I would occasionally climb into my bunk, jammed up against Mendel with my head propped up on his shoes, and daydream. In one moment I imagined Blima and father laughing together in his workshop as father pretended to hit his thumb with a hammer while demonstrating how to make shoes. Father would tell her she was going to be a fine shoemaker, and Blima would shake her head and insist that she was a lady and wanted to have children and raise them just like mother had. The next moment my thoughts would revolve around past vacations to my grandparents’ house by the lake. We would all be together like we had always been before, running around catching fireflies until our jars would become so full that more flies would escape from the jar than we could keep trapped inside with every opening of the lid. At other times I thought about mother, about how we used to talk uninhibited as if our souls were one and the same. When I thought of mother, I pulled her ring from beneath my shirt and twisted it around in my fingers as she used to, hoping that some of her spirit had implanted itself within it. The quiet time I spent meditating filled me with hope. The Germans could exert all of the exterior forces of torture and deprivation that they wanted on me, but they could not control my inner thoughts.
Infestations of lice wrecked havoc on us even more so than they had in the ghetto. These were not the kind of lice you usually find buried in your hair; the lice in the camps patrolled our bodies, entering our crevices and infecting us with their poisoned bacteria. We did our best to dig them out of our skin and fling them away, but for every one that we removed, ten more seemed to appear. Disinfection did little to help us since the lice inhabited the barracks; just as soon as we returned to
our bunks after our clothes and bodies were disinfected, we were re-infected. Other illnesses spread throughout the camp, spanning the spectrum from colds to tuberculosis. Most of us, if not all of us, experienced the symptoms that go along with dysentery because the fluids we drank were unclean. There was a constant search for bits of charcoal—most often found in buckets near the kitchens mixed together with discarded rubbish—so that we could neutralize the effects of diarrhea to a small degree. Thousands of prisoners died due to these illnesses, made worse by our diets and strenuous work coupled with our lack of antibiotics and medical care. We did our best to keep ourselves clean in between our infrequent showers, but rubbing ourselves with wet leaves and scraps of potato sacks merely got rid of the dirt from our skin without destroying the harmful germs that were on it. When someone didn’t return to his bunk at night, a new man took his place from a continuous wave of incoming transports. Each one of us was expendable; none of us was valuable.
The constant movement of cattle cars along the train tracks that crisscrossed through the camp was an ever-present sound, indicating the enormity of the lives affected by the war. Day and night I heard new arrivals entering the camp, going through the same process I had gone through two years earlier. I had assumed I would get used to the noise, that it would fade from my realm of consciousness so that I would not have to notice every time a new set of prisoners was arriving. Each time I heard the trains pull into the camp I relived the torture of my own arrival. My heart went out to each new victim. I imagined their fear as they saw all of the “muselmanner” walking around, and pictured their confusion as they were sorted and shaved. I could only imagine how dreadful, and scary, I must have looked to them. Although there were no mirrors in the camp and I could only catch distorted glimpses of my reflection in my metal bowl, I measured my appearance by how my brother looked. Each night I slept next to him, Mendel seemed to be taking up less of the bunk. Without layers of fat and muscle to fill out his features, his bones poked at my skin as he lay beside me. The healthy, robust brother I had once known was becoming a frail, weak shell with an extinguishing soul. Every kilogram that melted off his body was another anchor in my heart.
My Mother's Ring: A Holocaust Historical Novel Page 14
