Copyright © 2000, 2011 by Arnost Lustig
Translation copyright © 2001, 2011 by Ewald Osers
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Originally published in Czech under the title Krâsné zelené oei by Peron, Prauge
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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ISBN: 978-1-61145-487-1
For Eva and all who are and will be with her.
A. L.
To the memory of my mother, one of the millions who perished in the Holocaust.
E. O.
How many people have secrets that no-one ever discovers?
Part One
One
From early morning, units of the Waffen-S S had been arriving. They had demanded an extension of the shift until 4 p.m.
Fifteen: Hermann Hammer, Fritz Blücher, Reinhold Wuppertal, Siegfried Fuchs, Bert Lippert, Hugo Redinger, Liebel Ulrich, Alvis Graff, Siegmund Schwerste!, Herbert Gmund, Hans Frische, Arnold Frey, Philipp Petsch, Mathias Krebs, Ernst Lindow.
For the past three days the frost had been severe. The pipes in the former agricultural estate had burst when the water in them froze. The girls had been provided with two new tubs, but the water froze rock hard in these too. The river had frozen over. Iron rusted, steel fractured. Once or twice a train halted by the bridge because its engine’s boilers had burst. Inside, the plaster in the building developed mould and the walls of the cubicles turned black with soot from the stoves. The waiting room and the canteen, with its long table for 60 people, were no better. The living quarters resembled a bacon-curing shop.
Overnight the walls had acquired a crest of snow, like a chefs white hat pushed up from his forehead. At dawn, when the blizzard was over, when the wind had blown away the clouds and it was no longer snowing, it looked as if what lay on the ground was blood. For a few minutes the snow was steeped in purple and ruby red. An invisible silence hung over the landscape.
Inside, along the corridor, an inscription in spiky Gothic letters (the flashes of the S S insignia were ancient runes) declared: We were born to perish.
The silence was broken by a truck or a bus making for the field brothel. From the distance, from between the sky and the ground, came the rumble of artillery.
She had woken in the middle of the night. She had pain between her legs. Before her eyes and in her ears was the Pole who’d stood at the ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau when they’d stumbled from the trains – the deep, chesty voice of a broad-shouldered soldier of the Kanada squad who, over and over, had ordered the mothers to give the children to their grandmothers.
“Don’t ask why. Do it now!”
Having passed the doctors at the end of the long line who sent people either to the left or to the right, she had arrived at the Frauenkonzentrationslager and there understood the meaning of the order.
“Give the children to their grandmothers”.
The old women and the children had gone straight from the ramp to the gas chambers.
This is the story of my love. It is about love almost as much as it is about killing; about one of love’s many faces: killing. It is about No. 232 Ost, the army brothel that stood in the agricultural estate by the River San before the German army retreated further west; about 21 days, about what a girl of 15 endured; about what it means to have the choice of going on living or of being killed, between choosing to go to the gas chamber or volunteering to work in a field brothel as an Aryan girl. It is about what memory or oblivion will or will not do.
I fell in love with Hanka Kaudersovâ’s smile, with the wrinkles of a now 16-year-old, with the effect her face had on me. What saves me, apart from the uncertainty of it, is time. There are fragments out of which an event is composed, there are its colours and shades. And there is horror.
On that last day before the evacuation of No. 232 Ost, before they put Madam Kulikowa up against the back wall a few steps from the kitchen, and the first salvo shattered her teeth, she’d said that deep down she had expected nothing better.
Twelve: Karl Gottlob Hain, Johann Obersaltzer, Wilhelm Tietze, Arnold Köhler, Gottfried Lindner, Moritz Krantz, Andreas Schmidt, Granz Biermann, Garolus Mautch, August Kreuter, Felix Körner, Jorgen Hofer-Wettermann.
In my mind I can hear Madam Kulikowa introducing Skinny Kaudersovâ to No. 232 Ost on that first Friday morning … Anything that is not specifically permitted is forbidden. (This was something Skinny already knew from the Frauenkonzentrationslager at Auschwitz-Birkenau.) Regulations are posted on the cubicle doors. The soldier is always right. Kissing is forbidden. Unconditional obedience is demanded. You must not ask for anything.
“Any perks we share equally,” Madam Kulikowa said, with both uncertainty and cunning. “A man is like a child and generally behaves like one. He expects to get everything he wants. He will expect you to treat him unselfishly, like a mother.”
She urged her to think of pleasanter things.
Oberführer S chimmelpfennig had ordered the following notice to be posted on the doors of the cubicles, in the waiting room and in the washroom.
With immediate effect, it is forbidden to provide services without a rubber sheath. Most strictly prohibited are: Anal, oral or brutal intercourse; To take urine or semen into the mouth or anus; To re-use contraceptives.
During roll-call one day, Oberführer S chimmelpfennig threatened to import Gypsy women to the estate. He knew of at least five brothels in Bessarabia where they were employed. “No-one here is indispensable,” he said.
Twelve: Heinrich Faust, Felix Schellenberg, Fritz Zossen, Siegfried Skarabis, Adolf Seidel, Günther Eichmann, Hans Scerba, Rudolf Weinmann, Hugon Gerhard Rossel, Ernst Heidenkampf, Manfred Wostrell, Eberhardt Bergel.
In the evening, as they were sweeping by the gate which carried the German eagle, Skinny arranged the snow into symmetrical piles, and wondered whether she was punishing herself for being alive. What had become of Big-Belly, from whom she’d inherited Cubicle No. 16 and a pot for heating water and a small cask? Where was Krikri? Or Maria-Giselle? The first two had gone to the wall, the third to the “Hotel for Foreigners” at Festung Breslau. Here, as Oberführer S chimmelpfennig put it, Skinny was serving her apprenticeship. What kind of girl was Beautiful? Or Estelle, Maria-from-Poznan, Long-Legs, Fatty, Smartie and the others? What was the name, or the nickname, of the girl who died at two in the morning three days after Schimmelpfenning’s botched attempt at an appendectomy?
“If you don’t sleep you’ll feel like death warmed up in the morning,” said Estelle later that night. “You won’t change anything by not sleeping.”
There was fresh snow. A train with troops on home leave rattled across the st
eel bridge over the river.
“This is what it must be like in the Bering Straits,” Estelle said. “Except for those wintering, there isn’t a soul about.”
Skinny had never heard of the Bering Straits.
“Twenty-four hours of darkness every day. An ocean of ice,” Estelle said.
“How deep is it?” Skinny wanted to know. “Never mind. Go to sleep.”
Suddenly Estelle said: “Do you think anybody knows the truth?”
“About what?”
“About you. About me. About the Oberführer or Madam Kulikowa.”
“My head is spinning,” said Skinny. “I have to get some sleep.”
“My memory is failing me,” Estelle said.
“You should be grateful.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
Skinny’s eyes were falling shut. In a moment she would be asleep. It was cold and she would be frozen stiff by the morning. In the cubicle, with a soldier, it was at least warm, but the Oberführer did not allow the girls’ dormitories to be heated. They could nestle up to each other, he’d said. Skinny fell asleep thinking of the Frauenkonzentrationslager at Auschwitz-Birkenau, when she was still with her mother and her father. Before her father had thrown himself against the high-voltage fence and her mother was taken away at a selection parade. Her brother had gone to the gas chamber straight from the ramp.
Sometime before dawn Estelle said to her: “Did you know that you wake up, say something about your father and then fall asleep again? You sit up, half comb your hair, but you lack the strength to finish.”
“Do I talk in my sleep?”
“Only about your father. You turn about a bit.”
“I’m tired.”
“That’s all right.”
Two
Oberführer S chimmelpfennig corresponded with a doctor in Mauthausen in Austria. His friend was learning to amputate limbs, measuring the time before an amputee could walk again. Did he think of Helga, with whom he had been at University? She was training at Buchenwald. They were due to start at an army hospital together. They were thinking of getting married before they were transferred to the front, where they would have to operate in earnest.
For her part, after three tots of liquor Big Leopolda Kulikowa would return in her mind to the Odeon and the Gloria in Cracow. The fairytale of the frog that changed into a prince after a single, generous kiss should be rewritten, she felt, so that no-one was misled – those single girls in civvies who saw every possibility as love, for example. That’s how unmarried mothers pay for a single love-making … those girls don’t take account of their own worth, they give themselves away cheap, mostly for free. To the soldiers, a girl is like a spring of water in the desert.
Twelve: Gustav Habenicht, Sepp Bartells, Hanan Baltrusch, Fritz Puhse, Heinrich Rinn, Otto Scholtz, Heini Baumgarten, Fritz Heindl, Wilhelm Kube, Johannes Kurfürst, Rudolf Weissmüller, Hans Ewing.
There was an icy wind blowing, and freezing fog. The truck driver wiped his nose on his sleeve and muttered a few obscenities. He stacked the huge boxes he had stolen from a wooden Orthodox Church before setting fire to it in the office of the Oberführer, Dr Helmuth Gustav S chimmelpfennig.
I was still in Terezin at the end of September when I lost sight of Skinny. She was put on one of five transports going east. In the Frauenkonzentrationslager at Auschwitz-Birkenau she and her mother were put to work, at first, repairing the sides of rail wagons, sweeping roads and carrying stones to and from the Auto-Union plant. Eventually she found herself as a cleaner in the hospital block of Sturmbannführer Dr Julius Krueger, who sterilized her.
The day after Dr Krueger was promoted to Obersturmbannführer he performed an urgent operation on a frostbitten Waffen-S S Obergruppenführer, transplanting onto him a large patch of skin cut from a Jewish subhuman. For this, Dr Krueger was instantly transferred to the eastern front. He only had time to retrieve his medical diploma from the wall and one proclaiming him to be a doctor of philosophy and biology.
Skinny finished cleaning up the surgery. With a damp cloth she wiped blood from the tiles and polished the used instruments. Dr Krueger’s departure had left her at her wit’s end. She didn’t even dare contemplate what would happen in the morning. They would get rid of her as a compromising witness. She was alone in the surgery, perhaps the whole block, probably by mistake. She switched off the light, and the surgery windows were engulfed by the night. It was one of those nights at Auschwitz-Birkenau when the darkness seemed to mean the end of the world, the end of the last human being, the last tree, the last star.
Life at the Frauenkonzentrationslager was simply the opposite of how people had lived before they got there. She was faced with the deadening knowledge of what was an everyday occurrence: the medical experiments, the killing of people on a conveyor belt, the processions towards the basement undressing rooms of the five crematoria. And then the flames licking up from the low chimneys, exhaling in the form of soot and ashes the remains of what an hour previously had been living beings. From Monday, when the selections were held, to Sunday, and again from Monday to Sunday – again and again. In her mind she tried to tell somebody about it, just to convince herself that she was still sane. She clung to memories of people who had long forgotten her, but whom she once knew. The teacher at her primary school, who had commended her for drawing so well, or the music master who had tactfully told her that whatever she was going to succeed at when she grew up, it would not be a career in opera.
The surgery smelled of carbolic acid, iodine, blood and water. It was a smell Skinny had grown used to. Through the window she saw the fires of the No. 2 and No. 3 crematoria. While working for Dr Krueger, she wore an apron and didn’t have to endure what the other girls from the block had to undergo. She had a pass through the Postenkette, past the sentries. It expired that night. Even though she didn’t think of it for more than a second, everyone at Auschwitz-Birkenau could picture themselves in the basement undressing room, pulling off their clothes, stepping under the showers before the airtight door without an inside handle closed on them and the crystals of greenish Zyklon B began to drop from the shower-heads, turning to gas on contact with the air.
As well as the smell of the surgery, the greasy smoke which penetrated through every crack hung in the air. This was how she might live her final moments, though she had never harmed a soul. This was how she might rack her brains without ever finding an answer. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the final station for her. In her mind’s eye, she saw the inoffensive German word, the compound noun Endlösung, final solution.
She felt tense, like a mouse caught in a trap. Only yesterday she had been reassured by the presence of Dr Krueger, in his smart uniform with its silver epaulettes and silver-trimmed buttonholes. He could pick up the telephone and call his wife, or his grown-up children, just as he had called his daughter in Alsace. There was a question of what he would do on Sunday. But not now.
Skinny was hungry and thirsty, and knew it would be worse by morning. She was cold too, so she kept her headscarf on. The previous week she had had toothache. The girl she had replaced in Dr Krueger’s surgery had not received any special treatment either. Anyone here was alive at the expense of someone else.
She heard a noise in an office at the far end of the corridor that was rarely used. A door creaked and then slammed. Someone was going to the lavatory. She heard the door again and then water flushing. A girl appeared.
“Hello,” Skinny said, moving into the passageway.
“What is it?” the girl asked in Polish.
“Do you belong to this block?”
“No.”
The girl was about 18. She was dressed as if she were somewhere in Warsaw: a knee-length skirt, a blouse with short, puffed sleeves of a bright washable material, warm woollen socks and high lace-up boots – not at all what the female inmates looked like. Her hair was brushed into a quiff, the way boys used to wear it in Prague at the beginning of the war. The girl told her that t
he doctor who was to replace Krueger (she didn’t know his name) was choosing girls for a field brothel further east. With lightning speed Skinny considered what this could mean for her.
“If we’re lucky they’ll turn us into whores,” the girl said. “What do you think? Am I suitable?”
“Is it a selection?” Skinny asked.
“What’s that, a selection?”
“Sortierung. Sorting out.” The girl didn’t know the camp jargon.
“There are 60 of us and they’ll choose 30. He’s already told us. The rest can volunteer for nursing.”
Suddenly the light went out in the block, the outside lights as well.
“You have power cuts here just as in Warsaw?” the girl said.
What kind of girls had they brought here? From the far office came a voice shouting into a telephone:
“What? Half an hour to an hour? Scheisse. This is Hauptsturmführer Schneidhuber – Lucian Schneidhuber. Block 21.”
Then came the sound of him groping for the telephone and putting down the receiver. The instrument tinkled for a while before clicking and falling silent.
“Is there anybody else in this block? I need candles!” he called out.
Skinny knew about the candles. “Here,” she shouted into the dark, over the head of the girl. She picked up a flat box of candles, locating it from memory. Groping her way, she carried it to the far end of the corridor to the Hauptsturmführer. He gestured to her to wait by the wall, with the as yet unselected girls. Did he take her for one of the Aryan girls crowding the room? She had nothing to lose. In the morning she would be going up in smoke. The Hauptsturmführer lit the first candle with his lighter, then clicked it shut and with the burning wick lit another. With a candle in each hand, he let a few drops of wax fall on a black, cloth-bound, record book – the kind that Dr Krueger had also used – set the candles into it and held them in place for a moment.
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