On one occasion, a shipment or horribly pungent cheese was delivered to the lager. The cheese was packaged elegantly in wooden crates, each small portion wrapped in fine wax parchment paper. By the way it was packaged and prepared, one could see that this cheese had been intended for an upscale market. The cheese was repugnant to smell, however, and it was crawling with live worms.
Suti was part of a group of young boys repelled by the idea of looking at it, let alone eating it. But they were all hungry. Dr. Braun realized that what these young boys needed to survive was protein - something almost entirely devoid from their diet. He decided to make them believe that the cheese was an amazing delicacy.
Dr. Braun gathered the boys around him and, as if he was letting them in on a secret, leaned in close to them and began, "This is so delicious - an expensive gourmet treat. It is destined for very exclusive restaurants in Paris and London. The worms in it are specially bred in this cheese to make it more appealing to the taste buds: they make it crunchy, like eating almonds. You have no idea what you are missing if you don't taste it."
Dr. Braun unwrapped one of the elegantly wrapped portions from the wax paper, and as he held the cheese in the air, the worms were so plentiful they were falling, writhing as they landed on the ground.
"Mmmmmmm, this is soooo good. Delicious!" Dr. Braun said as he popped the entire chunk into his mouth at once. The expression on his face demonstrated sheer enjoyment as he continued to masticate the mouthful. Suti and the other boys were aghast. Then their growling stomachs sent encouraging signals to their brains: maybe it didn't taste as disgusting as it looked.
Although he pretended to be aloof and withdrawn, Suti couldn't prevent hearing the constant mutterings and discussions going on around him. While most adults were pessimistic about what was to come, others tried to convince themselves that there was reason to believe the war and their incarceration would be over soon. The arguments, sometimes in whispered tones, sometimes louder, went back and forth.
"We're never getting out of here. The simplest thing to do is to hang ourselves, commit suicide. They're going to kill us anyway."
"Listen to me; the Allies have landed in France. This is the end for the Nazis. The Americans are coming from the west, the Russians from the east. We will be liberated soon."
"Liberated? Soon? Are you crazy? With the smoke from those chimneys billowing out smoke and soot, operating around the clock, we will all be exterminated before the Americans arrive. They don't even know about us."
Sometimes Suti desperately wished he could block his ears to stop his hearing. But he was a curious boy, and found that, as a skinny young kid, he could easily go to the front of the crowd to find out what they were gathering to see.
Sometimes he regretted being so curious, such as the day he saw his first "jumper." By the time he fought his way through the crowd to see what the focus of their attention was, the unfortunate man was still clinging, with both hands firmly clutching the electrified fence. His hands were smoking and red-hot, partially turning black from the electrification. Those watching had to cover their noses with their hands as the putrid smell of burning flesh filled the air. The torso and head of the man were thrown back from the force of the electrical charge. The unfortunate man's eyes were wide open, the eyeballs nearly popping out of the sockets, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. He was obviously dead from the force of electrical blast, but his head, torso, eyes, and tongue kept moving with the powerful current still coursing through his body.
The camp guards were irritated by such "jumpers" as they had the task of cleaning up the mess. They ordered the gathered crowd to disperse immediately, swearing at them under their breath. But even as the onlookers stepped back just a few feet, they were mesmerized by the gruesome sight. They continued to watch as the camp guards turned off the electricity and removed the burnt corpse from the fence by hitting the lifeless hands with the butt of a rifle to dislodge the charred limbs from the fence, then dumping the dead man unceremoniously into a sack. Bits of burnt flesh were simply left on the fence. Some around him had already started praying for the dead man, some were praising him, muttering about his courage, about what a glorious, simple way it was to end this miserable existence.
Within a few weeks of landing in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Suti began to have serious doubts about the existence of God. It was all a story. No God would allow so many horrible things to happen to so many innocent people. How could God tolerate a place like this? Nothing made sense.
Suti went out of the barracks on a particularly melancholic evening, turned his face to the cloudless night sky, and, like a wolf howling at the moon, screamed obscenities at the heavens and challenged God to prove his power by striking him dead, right there, right then. The wind took his words away quickly.
Nothing happened. He yelled again. No answer except for the distant sounds of dogs barking, guards yelling orders, a train whistle blowing far away.
Suti listened again. His yelling at the heavens became more muted. Still no response. He had no more fear of anything: punishment for such blasphemy, the wrath of God, were concepts that were completely meaningless to him.
AFTER SIX WEEKS IN Auschwitz-Birkenau, Hedy had become obsessed with finding her brother. Hedy and her sister, Aliz, were inseparable: looking out, protecting, soothing, comforting one another. They shared their meagre portions, thoughts, small joys, and sorrows. But both were sick with worry about Suti and their father, and still held out hope, despite the horrible things that they heard around them, that Icuka was alive.
In a place where inmates would kill each other for a soup spoon, they learned to cope. Finding Suti, however, was one of their triumphs. It wasn't easy because they were moved from lager B2C to B2B, when the latter was emptied of a group of Czech Jews. Suti, they later found out, was also moved from the kinder lager to a men's lager (B2D), adjacent to the main entrance. Hedy cautiously approached anyone she thought could help in her search for him.
There was a young, serious-looking doctor in the camp. He was Jewish - an inmate as the rest of them - but could move between the women's and men's barracks. He came in one day and approached Hedy.
"A new group of women just arrived from Lizmanstadt. Could you please assist in finding my fiancée? I've heard she's with the newly arrived group. I'm desperate for news about her. They can't move around the camp yet, and I can't get in to see them. Please help me get word to her."
"If you describe her for me, I'll see what I can do," replied Hedy. The doctor provided a good description so that even without the colour, length, or type of her hair, Hedy found his fiancée and delivered the message.
After a few days, Hedy reported back.
"I've found your fiancée. She's fine and sends her love."
The young doctor was overcome with emotion upon hearing the news.
"How can I thank you?" he asked sincerely.
Hedy paused for a second, then replied, "My younger brother is in your lager. He's very young - he's called Suti. Could you bring him in as a worker the next time you come?"
The young doctor's face turned gloomy. "My movements are restricted, unfortunately, but I know the kapo who is in charge of the disinfection commando. I'm sure he could do something. I'll bring him over to meet you."
The doctor kept his promise and arranged a meeting with the kapo, who was very different from Hedy's expectations. He was a red, freckle-faced, pert Polish Jew called Dzeidjic. Of average height and stocky, Dzeidjic seemed quite arrogant. His thick auburn hair was combed straight back. Hedy could tell by the way Kapo Dzeidjic stared at her that he was impressed with her looks. He stopped when she approached, and his mouth opened just a bit, as if he wanted to say something, but no words came out. He simply stood in one spot, tapping one foot on the ground, curling the end of his little red moustache with his fingers, looking uncomfortable. But he didn't leave.
"What do you want?" he snapped at her in a gruff manner.
"My brother is in the same lage
r where you are," Hedy replied, unfazed by the tone. "The next time you come in, could you bring him as a worker? I simply want to see him for a short visit."
"How old is your brother?" the kapo asked. He seemed to be impressed with the courage of this young woman.
"Fourteen," Hedy replied cautiously.
Softening his tone a bit, the kapo then asked with a half-smile, "Is he as pretty as you are?"
"He's much better looking," Hedy said as she returned the smile.
"Does he know any languages?" Dzeidjic asked.
"Yes, he does."
"Okay, here's my word: tomorrow you will see your brother."
While Hedy realized that, even without any hair, in a torn old burlap dress, she had managed to make an impression on the kapo, she was skeptical about whether this arrogant man would actually make an effort to carry through with his promise. Hedy went back to the doctor, thanked him for his help, and asked him to personally find Suti and take him to the kapo.
The next day, in the middle of the morning, Hedy and Aliz heard their names being called from a distance. They looked at each other quizzically. The yelling came from the direction of the railway line, beyond the electrified fences. The voices were male and sounded strong, confident. The rail line ran parallel to one side of their barracks, and they stared in the direction of the voices. There, on an open rail car, side by side, stood Suti and Kapo Dzeidjic. Suti had his arms stretched up toward the sky, as he yelled for the attention of Hedy and Aliz. Suti looked so pleased! Hedy and Aliz shot their hands up as well - tears of joy were streaming down their faces as they yelled Suti's name.
A few hours later, the kapo brought Suti in to them and they had a chance to talk. Hedy and Aliz both hugged Suti for minutes before they would let him go. Suti was breathless in his excitement, anxious to tell his sisters about all the things that had happened to him in the past twenty-four hours.
"The kapo said he will take me to the kleidungskammer (place to get new clothes). I have a job cleaning his shoes, and I already got more food."
Hedy was so pleased. She fought back tears of joy as she saw her younger brother's beaming face and new-found happiness. The excitement poured out of Suti as he explained how Dzeidjic had found him and given him a job: he would be cleaning Dzeidjic's boots. Suddenly, Suti stopped, as if he had remembered something. He moved in close to Hedy and whispered in her ear, "The kapo wants to marry you."
"Really?" Hedy replied, feigning a look of surprise.
Suti nodded, his brown eyes becoming rounder, more animated.
Hedy didn't realize it then, but later learned that Kapo Dzeidjic was an individual who wielded tremendous power and influence in the camp, one of the kapos connected to Commando Kanada.
Commando Kanada consisted of several groups. The name itself was associated with wealth within the concentration camp, because this group collected and sorted through all the packages, foodstuffs, and other objects the new arrivals brought with them. The inmates who worked within Commando Kanada could get things because they had a seemingly never-ending supply of food, clothing, carpets, silver, jewellery, and other valuable objects to barter, trade, and sell. The early Polish prisoners gave the group this name because it evoked the land of legendary wealth to which many of their relatives had emigrated before the war.
One of the brigades of Commando Kanada climbed through the boxcars like hyenas, poring over left bags - lifting and recognizing within seconds what was salvageable and disposing of everything else.
After the boxcars were emptied of their human cargo and left luggage, Kapo Dzeidjic and his group took charge. Their job was to disinfect the boxcars of the stench of human feces, urine, and vomit, and to remove dead bodies.
The men in the Dzeidjic brigade lugged a large barrel full of two hundred litres of disinfectant with them. The barrel was pulled on wheels. Two men pumped the barrel while the third sprayed the boxcar using a directional hose. As the disinfectant was pumped out, there was more and more room in the barrel for found treasures. As they worked, they lifted the lid and dropped the valuables into the barrel.
When Dzeidjic marched into the barracks, everyone became silent, watching him with rapt attention. He was the commander of the prestigious unit. The kapo could be furious when provoked, but most of the time, his crew followed his instructions to the letter.
Suti polished the kapo's boots. The storage area had all kinds of brushes, shoeshine creams, and leather polishes. He spent hours scraping and brushing away every centimetre of dirt and coaxing a brilliant shine out of the dull leather. When Dzeidjic witnessed the thoroughness of his work, he named Suti his personal boot cleaner. From that point on, Suti realized he had a critically important task to do and no longer had to spend hours of solitary time in making geometric patterns in the dirt.
Another bond eventually developed between the two. Dzeidjic let Suti discover one of his most guarded secrets: Dzeidjic couldn't read. Once or twice, Dzeidjic simply handed Suti a note and ordered, "read this out loud to me." By the third or fourth time this happened, it dawned on Suti that the kapo was incapable of reading and that this was another way Suti could make himself indispensable.
To deflect attention away from his inability to read, Dzeidjic gave Suti notes in Polish, a language he knew the young boy didn't know how to decipher.
When Suti was ordered to read the notes in Polish out loud, Dzeidjic laughed heartily and ridiculed the young boy's pronunciation. But Suti didn't mind. Dzeidjic couldn't read and Suti couldn't pronounce Polish words. In Dzeidjic's mind, they both had a handicap.
Day by day, a bit of hope crept into Suti's heart and mind. He considered himself fortunate. He felt that as long as he was under the protection of Dzeidjic, he was impervious to the monotony and hunger of the camp. And, even more importantly, the kapo provided Suti a purpose, a patron, a light through the despair.
chapter 17 | fall 1944
HEDY AND ALIZ SOMEHOW adapted to the heat and stench, to the hunger and the desolation, but still their long. hot days in Auschwitz-Birkenau seemed interminable. News and rumours flew through the camp, at times bringing optimism to their miserable existence, at other times pushing them deeper into despair that their suffering was never going to end. They were overjoyed to hear that the Americans had landed on the shores of France and would come to liberate them, but the anticipation of their arrival slowly diminished as the days wore into weeks, and then months.
The sisters developed ways of coping with daily life inside the concentration camp. The two became inseparable - they shared everything. At night they snuggled close to each other, comforting each other merely by their physical presence.
Aliz had one leg that was shorter than the other: this disability caused her to limp. Physically, it was much more exhausting for her to keep up with the rest. Hedy balanced out her sister's physical ailment with her zest and energy. If at four-thirty in the morning Aliz was too exhausted to get out of bed for zehl appel; it was Hedy who willed her strength into her sister and pulled her to her feet.
The lager they were in contained thirty-two barracks, with one latrine in the middle. The toilets consisted of a cement hole, and there was no paper, no soap, no privacy wall. The length of the first dress Hedy received extended all the way down to her ankles. She tore strips off of her long cotton dress and used these bits as toilet paper. As the days passed, the hemline of the dress got shorter and shorter.
Within a few months, their menstruation stopped. Hedy thought it must have been something - a drug - they added to their food that suppressed their monthly cycle. Hedy didn't know how they would have coped with that.
Once a month, they were taken for an entlausung (delousing bath). Ordered to strip and throw all their shoes, dresses, and underwear into a pile, they were assigned new clothing from piles of over-washed, over-bleached, and threadbare clothing. They stood in single file and were handed a bundle of clothing - whatever they were doled out is what they had to wear for the next month. On one s
uch occasion, Hedy was handed a dress that did not cover her left breast - the fabric was completely ripped away. Realizing she had to wear this dress for the foreseeable future, Hedy managed to find a discarded piece of cloth to cover the gap, and somehow tied it to the rest of the dress so it wouldn't come apart.
If Hedy was handed a better pair of shoes, she passed them on to her sister. A shoe without proper support only made Aliz's limp more pronounced. Sometimes Hedy was assigned a pair of shoes that were mismatched. These things didn't seem to matter. In Hedy's mind, these were all challenges, all obstacles to be overcome by ingenuity and determination.
Hedy and Aliz were frequently selected to work in the Essen-Commando, a group that helped distribute the daily rations. If either got one more carrot or bit of soup, they shared it. As there were no utensils or dishes to eat with, four or five women shared a bowl of soup, counting the spoonfuls for each, making sure each spoonful was distributed equally. A discarded soup can was considered a great treasure, as it was immediately transformed into a highly prized eating utensil. If Aliz got a piece of a radish or potato in her soup, she wedged it between her teeth until Hedy bit the other half off. Hedy always reciprocated her sister's generosity. The bread was the size of a brick: at first they divided it among six, then eight, then ten. By the end of this game of division, each was left with a quarter of a slice each.
Between the mind-numbing activities of their daily routine, zehl appel, and talking about how famished they were, some women organized impromptu gatherings when and where they could, to tell stories they recalled from books and recite poetry. Often Hedy took the initiative. She remembered that as a young girl she couldn't comprehend why they had to memorize so many poems by rote. Now she was grateful for the many hours she spent learning poetry as the poetry recitations and the songs they sang at home with their parents all came flooding back, providing the only escape from the present environment of dread and boredom.
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