by Alan Gratz
The tight little crawl space under the floorboards suddenly felt like a coffin, like I was already dead and buried. My refuge from the nightmare of Plaszów was now a trap. It was all I could do not to burst out of it screaming.
“Yanek, what do we do?” Isaac asked, his voice tight with the same desperation I felt.
I looked out through the cracks. Goeth was coming closer, all shining black leather boots and crisp black uniform. One of his dogs lifted its ears and looked right at me.
I pulled back, away from the wall. “We’re trapped. We have to get out of here. We have to get out of here.” I was almost choking on my own fear.
“And go where?” Thomas hissed. “If we leave, they’ll find us in the barrack!”
“I don’t care. We can’t be caught here.” I twisted and squirmed until I was on my back. If I could just lift that board, see the light from the room, breathe the air. It was so tight down here. So close. Closing in —
Isaac grabbed my hand. “Yanek, we can’t.”
“We have to!” I had to get out of this coffin. “We’ll … we’ll pretend we’re on a work detail.”
“He’ll kill us! Goeth will kill us!” Thomas said.
“Either he’ll kill us, or he won’t,” I told him. “But I know one thing — if he finds us hiding down here, he’ll kill us for sure!”
I pushed my way up and out of the crawl space. It felt like coming up for air after being underwater. I was free of my little coffin! I gasped, filling my lungs. But if I didn’t really want to die, I had to move fast. We all did. I helped Isaac out, then Thomas, and we put the board back as quickly and quietly as we could. My heart was thumping, but it made me feel alive, and feeling alive made me want to stay alive.
The only way we were going to get out of this was to make Goeth believe we were on a work detail, and he could smell fear as well as his dogs could. Maybe even better.
I dragged Isaac and Thomas to the door with me. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll do the talking.”
We left the barrack right as Goeth and his dogs turned the corner.
“You there! Stop!” Goeth shouted. “Where are you going?”
My hands shook as I doffed my cap like we were drilled to do. “We were sent to a work detail on the south side of camp, sir!” I shouted, my voice breaking I was trembling so badly.
Goeth’s dogs stared at us, panting. Their ears pricked up, like they were just waiting for Goeth to tell them to attack us. Could they smell my fear? Did the dogs know I was lying?
I stood my ground and tried not to shake. I was deathly afraid, but everyone was afraid when they met Goeth, whether they’d been hiding or not.
Goeth glared at us for a long moment, then walked by without saying another word. Isaac and Thomas and I stood rooted to the spot, afraid to say or do anything that would make Goeth reconsider. When he was a few steps gone I realized that not moving was the wrong thing, and I grabbed my friends and pulled them along again. “Let’s go,” I whispered, and we hurried around the corner.
We didn’t stop when Goeth was out of sight, but I could finally breathe. In trying to survive, I’d come closer than I’d ever been to dying.
I would never hide under the floorboards again.
One morning at roll call, I was one of fifty prisoners pulled out of the ranks and loaded onto a truck. The Nazis didn’t tell us where we were going.
“They’re taking us away to kill us,” one of the men said.
But that didn’t make any sense. Amon Goeth had no problem killing any of us at Plaszów. Why bother to load us into a truck and take us somewhere else to kill us? Just looking around at the others the Nazis had chosen, I could tell we were the strongest men at Plaszów — or at least the furthest from becoming Muselmanners. I was sure we were being taken somewhere else to work, and I was sure it had to be better than Plaszów.
My two weeks saving my strength under the floor of my barrack had saved me.
The truck pulled up outside a building with a tall spire, like a bell tower, but this was no church. The place had an industrial look to it; oil-covered motors and generators stood around it like sentinels, and train tracks led into it and out.
The Nazi in charge of our truck unloaded us, and we joined another group of prisoners who’d been brought in from somewhere else. I ended up standing next to a man who looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him.
“Are you from Kraków?” I asked him.
“No!” he said, with surprising force. “I am no one!”
He was right, of course. I shouldn’t even have asked. But I noticed two of the other men who came with me from Plaszów looking at him more intently now.
“First we will take you into the mine, to show you where you will be working,” a kapo told us. “Then you will be assigned to your barracks.”
We were marched into the factory, which wasn’t a factory after all. It was the sheltered entrance to an enormous mine. In groups of ten and twelve we boarded elevators. I got on with the familiar-looking man and the two prisoners from Plaszów who’d been watching him. They stood close beside him now, uncomfortably close, but he didn’t say anything. He just stared at the floor.
The elevator kachunked, and down, down, down, we went. Electric lights on the open elevator cage illuminated the gray-white walls of the mine shaft as we descended. Suddenly I was reminded of being under the floorboards again in Plaszów. I was squeezed in, underground. Trapped, in the dark, with death coming for me….
“Salt,” one of the others whispered. “The Wieliczka salt mine. It has to be.”
My trance was broken. I reached out my hand to touch the wall and tasted my fingers. It was true — the walls were made of salt!
The elevator car hit bottom, and we were guided through a labyrinth of tunnels and small chambers.
“You’ll be working room forty-seven,” our kapo told us. “Level seven.”
We marched down salt stairs, we crawled along salt floors, we passed stalagmites formed from salt water dripping off the ceiling. I had never seen anything like it. The mine was like a strange dreamworld. Very soon we left the electric lights behind and could see only as far ahead of us as our kapo’s carbide headlamp.
“Maybe you’re thinking it would be easy to slip away in the tunnels,” our kapo told us. “Maybe you are thinking it would be easy to escape into the darkness. There are nine levels. Three hundred kilometers of tunnels. Maybe you are thinking we would never find you.”
The kapo stopped and turned his headlamp on us.
“You’re right. We wouldn’t find you. You would be lost forever in a maze blacker than night, with nothing to eat but salt, and nothing to drink but salt water. If I were you, I wouldn’t get lost — either on purpose, or by accident.”
We all followed closer behind him the rest of the way.
The kapo showed us the room where we would be working. The picks and shovels we would be using. The carts we would fill with them. The other prisoners who worked the mine were already back in their barracks, asleep. We would get up with them before dawn and come right back here to work, without a full night’s sleep. Just the thought of it made my arms and legs ache.
The kapo took us out a different way, through a vast chamber where every footstep echoed. One of the men in front of me stumbled, and a piece of salt clattered off the wooden boardwalk beneath us and splashed. Water! There was an entire lake under here. It rippled and glimmered black in the light from the kapo’s lamp.
Up more steps we went, and another elevator, until we came to another huge chamber, this one lit with electric light again. Here there was no lake, but something even more amazing: statues! Dozens of figures, all carved out of salt. And the lights in the ceiling — they were chandeliers. Chandeliers made out of salt. After so many months and years of dirty streets and peeling paint, of gray uniforms and spartan barracks, it was astounding that there could still be beauty in the world. Especially here, a mile underground.
“The workers,
the miners — they did this,” whispered the man who’d told me the name of the mine before. “Some of these statues are a thousand years old.”
There were trolls and serpents and gnomes. There were Polish knights and kings and queens. I wished they could somehow, magically, come to life and free us — save us.
They stayed still though, frozen in salt. As trapped and helpless as we were.
The last room was another monument left by former miners in Wieliczka’s happier past. It was a temple, a chapel — no, an underground cathedral. There were more statues, an altar, a rail. Everything a Catholic needed to hold services. But praying hadn’t done the miners any good either. The Nazis owned almost all of Poland now, even three hundred meters underground.
Night had fallen and the stars were out when we got back topside. We were taken to our barracks, which were no better than our last at Plaszów. Because we’d missed dinner we were sent to bed without any food. We knew better than to complain, and most of us went to our beds as quickly as we could. Morning, as we all knew, would be there before any of us were ready for it.
But the two men who’d been looking strangely at the man I thought was familiar cornered him once the kapo was gone.
“Your name is Holtzman, isn’t it?” one of them said.
“No,” the familiar-looking man said. “No, my name is Finkelstein!”
“You were in Kraków, weren’t you?” the other man said. “You were one of the Judenrat’s policemen.”
Of course! That’s why I remembered him! How could I have forgotten that face? He was the man who had brought the Nazis to my flat, the one who had stolen everything else from us while the Nazi took my mother’s ring. I remembered my mother’s eyes that day, the emptiness that had never completely gone away. I’d been so scared, so protective, that I hadn’t even felt anger.
I did now.
“No!” the policeman said. There was panic in his eyes. “My name is Finkelstein! From Zielonki!”
“Quiet in there!” a kapo’s voice shouted from outside. The two men said nothing more to the policeman, but they watched him all the way back to their bunks. That night, I could hear the man crying softly in his bed, until someone hissed at him to shut up.
The morning was cold, with only lukewarm, coffee-flavored water to fight off the chill. It was colder still underground, where it was always damp and the sun never shone. The low ceiling made us all walk like old crones, and I noticed that even when they could, some of the old-timers never stood up straight anymore. Their backs were permanently bent.
I was given my own carbide light, my own pickax, and my own place to work. It was heavy work, and boring; there was nothing to it but swinging my pickax again and again, breaking off big chunks of salt that another prisoner shoveled into a donkey cart. I chipped away, my arms already starting to ache from weakness and malnutrition, when I heard someone cry out from the chamber around the corner from mine.
“What’s this? How did this happen? Who’s done this?”
It was the voice of one of the kapos. It wasn’t said in the tone the kapos used to taunt us or goad us into working harder. This was something different. Something confused. Something scared. The other kapos heard it in his voice right away and ran around the corner to help. Without guards, we put down our picks and our shovels and hurried to peek around the corner behind them.
It was the Judenrat policeman. Holtzman or Finkelstein or whatever his name was. His head had been smashed in with a shovel, and the rest of his body was gashed and torn and bleeding. In the carbide light from a dozen watching headlamps, something glittered and shone in his cuts.
Salt. Someone had rubbed salt in all his wounds. Like Abimelech, in the book of Judges, who sowed the fields of his own people with salt after he put down their rebellion. I remembered reading about him while studying the Torah with my father, long before the war.
This was punishment and purification, all in one.
“I said I want to know who did this!” the kapo yelled.
I looked around from face to face, trying to see who had done it. The men who had accused him in the barracks weren’t there. It could have been any of them. It could have been all of them.
No one said anything, and I worried we would all be whipped for the crime. But the kapo only shook his head.
“What do I care if you kill one another? You’ll all be dead soon enough anyhow. You. And you,” he said, pointing to two of the prisoners watching nearby. “Drag his body out of here, weight him down, and dump him in the underground lake.”
No one said another word about him. The kapos sent us back to our places, and I chipped away at the salt wall again until they told me to stop.
That night, I dreamed the salt statues came to life and set on our captors with their swords, but every one of the statues had the face of the dead man.
Our job was to move a pile of rocks.
They were big rocks, and it was a big pile. The rocks were heavy and rough, and we were given no wheelbarrows or gloves. The rocks had to be moved from one side of the assembly field to another, and the Nazis yelled at us and beat us if we were too slow or if they thought we were carrying a rock that was too small for us. I put my arms around another stone and lifted, my back crying out in pain. The rock tore and scraped at my skin as I cradled it to my chest and staggered across the yard to dump it in the new pile. Then I did it again. And again. One of the other men stumbled and collapsed, and the guards fell on him with sticks and clubs. I hefted another rock and kept working while I tried not to let the Nazis see how afraid I was. They were like Amon Goeth’s dogs — they could smell fear on you, and they liked nothing better than to attack when you were at your weakest.
By midday, my arms and hands and chest were so raw and bruised I couldn’t have gone on, but by then we were finished. I would have dropped to the ground but I knew I would just be beaten for it, so I stood with the others, wobbling on my shaking legs while I waited for the guards to tell us what new task awaited us.
“Good,” the SS officer in charge of us said. “Now move it back.”
I blinked stupidly, not understanding at first. We had just worked all morning to move this pile of stones across the camp, and now the Nazis were changing their minds? The other prisoners and I looked at one another to see if we had heard right.
“I said move this pile back to where it was!” the SS officer yelled. He moved through our group, hitting us with a stick until we moved. “You will move it to where it was, and then you will move it again! Now work!”
Such was life at the Trzebinia concentration camp.
I had been transferred there after a short time mining salt at Wieliczka. Wieliczka had been hard, but Trzebinia was worse, because at Trzebinia the Nazis played games. The Nazis were making us work just to work. This was all a game to them, like a hand of cards or a soccer match. We were the ball, to be kicked around for their sport.
My arms shook as I picked up the same stone that I had just carried across the compound, but not from weariness this time. From fury. I fumed as I hefted the stone and trudged back across the muddy compound. But they wanted me to be angry. They wanted me to say something, or frown, or mumble curses at them. They were watching me for it. Watching all of us. Like schoolyard bullies, they wanted to provoke us, and then they would beat us as punishment.
At Trzebinia I worked all day moving piles of rocks back and forth, digging holes six feet deep and then filling them back in again. I ate watery broth and week-old bread once a night and passed out on a wooden pallet with no mattresses or pillows or blankets. I was an animal to them, a pack mule. But beasts were never treated so poorly. Working animals were expensive. They had value. I was a Jew. We were lower than animals. They could kill as many of us as they wanted, and there would always be another trainload of us to take our place.
But as angry as I was at the Nazis, I was even angrier at my fellow prisoners. How could we take this abuse so quietly, so meekly, with our heads bowed and a qui
ck tip of the cap to our killers? Yes, the Nazis had clubs and guns, but there were far more of us than there were of them. If we turned on them all at once, we could overcome them. We were not animals to be led to the slaughter! We were thinking, feeling human beings! One day, in the middle of hauling rocks again, I vowed not to be killed without a fight. My father, Uncle Moshe, the Jewish elders, they were all wrong. We shouldn’t be trying to survive, we should be trying to win. Instead of waiting for the British or the Americans or the Russians to save us, we should be saving ourselves.
I’m not going to let them line me up on the edge of a pit and shoot me, I told myself. I will fight back. I will kick the Nazis in the shins. I will run. I won’t go like a sheep to the slaughter!
At roll call that night, someone else had the same thought. One of the Nazis struck him with a club, but instead of taking the beating meekly the prisoner raised his arms and grabbed the stick. He wrestled it from the shocked officer’s hands and struck him with it in the head, knocking his Nazi hat into the muck, striking his raised arms again and again.
Yes! Yes, I thought. It begins here. Together we can take them all! I looked around anxiously to see if anyone else felt as I did, if anyone else would take up the charge, but everyone had their heads down. No! This was our chance! If we fought together —
Crack! I jumped at the sound. With the fiery spark of a pistol, it was all over. The prisoner who had fought back crumpled to the ground, dead from a bullet to the brain, and the assaulted officer was hurried away from the assembly grounds. The camp’s soldiers appeared in force around the edges of our lines, pointing rifles at us, and the camp commandant hurried out from his cozy office. When he heard the report from his officers, he turned on the prisoners.
“You!” he cried, pointing at a boy who had been standing right next to the man who fought back. “You were a part of this plot to escape!”
