“Not now,” the guard said. “Together again afterwards.”
“After what?” Netanel shouted.
The guard snatched Mandelbaum’s suitcase out of his hands and threw it to one side.
“My things!”
“You get your luggage back later,” the guard said. He pushed Mandelbaum back into line with the others.
“Are you going to gas us?” he heard a woman ask one of the guards.
“What do you take us for? Barbarians?”
Some skeletons in striped pajamas, their skulls shaved smooth, appeared on the platform and moved silently through the crowd. They had a curious, shambling gait, heads bowed, arms rigid, like ghosts rising from a graveyard. Some piled the discarded luggage on trolleys, others climbed into the boxcars and heaved the corpses onto the platform.
One of them rolled his mother out of the door like a sack of potatoes. She landed on her head. Netanel thought he heard the bones crack. She lay there for a few moments in her soiled nightgown, twisted and grotesque, and then more bodies were piled on top of her and then he couldn’t see her anymore.
I should fight them, he thought. I should make a stand. Look what they have done to my mother. But thirst and exhaustion had left him numb. He could barely stand.
The women and children were marched towards the lorries with the red crosses, flanked by guards with Alsatian dogs on chain leashes. Sophie looked back and waved. Mandelbaum smiled and waved too as his family climbed into the back of a lorry.
When they were gone, the men were led to some army trucks waiting on the other side of the station building. Netanel prayed for death; he prayed even harder for a glass of water.
The sign above the wrought-iron gate read:
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
YOUR LABOURS SHALL SET YOU FREE
“See . . .” Mandelbaum croaked. “It’s a work camp . . . they won’t kill us.”
They passed row upon row of brick buildings. When the convoy came to a halt they were again surrounded by more SS, who roared at them to get out of the trucks. Only the SS can bellow like that, Netanel thought. He wondered if it was perhaps a qualification for induction. The men with the loudest voices stayed at home to beat up the Jews; the rest went to the Eastern Front and died of frostbite.
They were herded into a large, empty room and the door was slammed shut behind them. Netanel looked around. There were perhaps fifty other men like himself, filthy wraiths with dead eyes. The harsh glare of a single light bulb leeched the color from their faces.
There was a tap in the corner of the room. Everyone was staring at it. None of them had drunk anything for days. There was a sign on the wall:
IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DRINK THE WATER.
The joke was monstrous. Are we all Mandelbaums? Are we going to die of thirst because a sign tells us we cannot drink? He shoved the man in front of him out of the way and turned on the faucet. He knelt and opened his mouth under the stream. The water was warm and brown and tasted like a swamp.
He spat it out.
The others watched him, and he could see the despair on all their faces. Netanel pressed his forehead against the wall.
Perhaps I died on the train after all, Netanel thought. This is hell, a place where you are parched with thirst and they bring you to a room where the only water is rotten.
Someone at the back of the room fainted and his skull cracked on the floor as he fell. The sound jarred Netanel back to the present. He thought about his Mutti, how those skeletons in striped pajamas had just tossed her body on the platform. Perhaps being dead wasn’t such a bad thing. She wanted to go home and now she was.
An SS guard threw open the door. This is it, Netanel thought.
He understood now what the tap was for. They have to wash away the blood afterwards. There must be a drain in the other corner. Perhaps, a day ago, he would have tried to put up a fight. Now, he no longer cared. Let’s just get it over with.
“Out,” the guard said.
They were led across the compound to another building, some sort of change-room. There were pegs all around the walls. “Take off your clothes,” the guard said. “Put all your money and jewelry in the pockets so it won’t be stolen.”
Stolen? Netanel thought. By whom? He took off the Star of David that Marie had given him and hid the metal star in his fist. These bastards weren’t getting that. He stripped off.
“In there,” the guard said.
Look at us! He thought. Naked, filthy, meekly doing what we’re told. The door clanged shut behind them.
They were in a shower-room, ankle deep in cold, filthy water. They looked at each other. Someone knelt down and started to lap the putrid water like a dog.
What next?
Nothing happened.
Suddenly there were bells clanging everywhere and an icy torrent of water burst over their heads from the showers. Everyone shouted out in shock. Netanel opened his mouth and let some of the water run into his mouth but he spat it out again immediately. It was rank also. Some of it leaked down his throat and he retched.
He scrubbed at the dirt and filth from the train, and the encrusted blood in his hair. He did it automatically, but as he washed, shivering with cold, he thought: if they were going to kill us, they wouldn’t make us shower first!
They had taken everything he had, murdered his mother, humiliated and starved him, but there might still be some way to survive.
Their heads were shaved to the accompaniment of shouts and blows from the guards and, still naked, they were lined up in alphabetical order to have numbers tattooed on their arms.
Netanel became prisoner 81305.
They were given uniforms; caps, jackets and trousers of grey and blue stripes, with their number sewn on the front next to a red and yellow Star of David. They were given a tin soup bowl the size of a basin and a pair of wooden clogs.
They dared not look at each other because they would see themselves, the same nightmare vision that had greeted them when they arrived at Oswiecim: skeletons in pajamas.
Survive? Netanel thought. I have joined the living dead.
That evening they squatted in the dirt outside the barracks, with their ration. The camp was a Babel of voices; Polish, German, Yiddish, Russian, shouts and threats and entreaties in a dozen languages.
“A piece of advice,” someone said. “Never rush to the front of the queue when they serve the soup.” His name was Dov and he was a camp veteran. He had been transported to Oswiecim from the Warsaw ghetto over four months ago. He could speak good German; he said he had been educated in Berlin. He was a big fellow, and although most of the flesh had wasted off him, there was a hint of his former strength in his manner and in the intensity of his pale blue eyes.
“But we haven’t had food or water for days,” Netanel said. He had drunk down half his “soup” in one gulp. Soup? A pint of salty water, flavored with cabbage leaves and some pieces of turnip.
“You are a High Number. You don’t know anything,” Dov said, and he slurped the soup into his mouth with a metal spoon. “The quicker you learn, the better it will be for you.”
“Learn what?”
There was both pity and scorn in his eyes. “Listen, forget everything you ever knew before you came here. Try and imagine you just dropped here out of the sky. Now you have to start all over again, like a little baby. So: the first thing you must learn is never to stand at the front of the soup queue.”
“Why?”
“Because only the liquid is at the top. It is always thicker at the bottom.”
Netanel watched Dov eat, spooning scraps of vegetable from the bottom of the bowl.
“Where did you get the spoon?”
“I can get one for you. It will cost you a ration of bread.”
“All right.”
“I’ll have it for you tomorrow. Then you give me the bread.”
Netanel tried to force more of the foul stew down, but his stomach rebelled. He spat it out. Dov stared at him, open-mouthed.
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One of the other prisoners shuffled towards him, his bowl held in front of him like a beggar. He kept bowing his head, like a dog that was accustomed to regular beatings. It seemed he wanted the rest of the soup.
Netanel pushed it towards him but before the man could take it, Dov snatched it away. “Another rule. You don’t waste good food on Müsselmen. You have to look after your friends in here.”
Dov poured the rest of Netanel’s soup into his own bowl.
“What’s a Müsselman?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
The “Müsselman” shuffled back to his corner of the hut.
“Are all the meals as bad as this?”
“What other meals? The only other meal is breakfast: a slice of bread and a cup of coffee.”
Netanel bit off a hunk of the bread. Some of the crumbs fell on his jacket. Dov pulled them off with his fingers, transferring them quickly to his mouth, like a monkey picking fleas.
Netanel pushed him away. “What are you doing?”
“Hold your bowl under your chin,” Dov said. “Like this. Then you won’t spill anything.”
Netanel looked across the yard at Mandelbaum; poor, empty-headed Mandelbaum, who still believed they would give him back his luggage and his clothes, and reunite him with his family. But there he was, draining his soup bowl to the last drop, holding his bowl under his chin to catch the breadcrumbs like a Low Number.
Poor empty-headed Mandelbaum will live longer than me.
There were endless rows of two-storey brick barracks. Netanel, Mandelbaum and the others were assigned a dormitory. The bunks were just wooden planks, covered with straw and rough sacking. They were tiered four high, divided by three corridors, stacked to the roof.
There were insufficient places for everyone, so Netanel shared his bunk and a single filthy blanket with Mandelbaum. He tried to sleep, but the straw made him itch and once the lice started to bite he couldn’t lie still. His tongue felt like a piece of leather and his head throbbed with pain.
“This will be the last outrage for the people of Germany,” Mandelbaum said.
I will do the Germans’ job for them! Netanel thought, I will kill him myself! “What are you talking about now?”
“What do you think the people of Ravenswald will do when they wake up and discover what Hitler has done? You cannot just deport hundreds of good Germans from a town and get away with it.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No, this time he has gone too far! They will rise up!”
“No one cares what they do to us.”
“Neither do I!” someone hissed. “Go to sleep!”
Sleep?
The barrack lights were still on. “They never turn off the lights,” Dov had said. “Not ever.”
But then, quite suddenly, they were plunged into darkness for a few blessed seconds before the lights flickered on again.
“My God, do they never give up trying to find new ways to torment us?” Netanel said aloud.
“That’s not the Germans,” Dov said from the bunk below. “Some poor swine’s thrown himself on the electric wire.”
Netanel lay awake, imagining the body sizzling out there on the frost hard ground; he heard his mother’s skull hitting the platform, over and over; he tried to form the words of a prayer for Marie.
His last thought was: they are not going to break me. I will get through this somehow. I will survive. I will see her again and I will survive.
Every time he drifted off to sleep he was jerked awake by the sound of water splashing into a tin bucket as one of the others got up to urinate. That’s how it went all through the night. The huge amounts of water in the soup had filled all their bladders. Once, out of habit, Netanel tried to check the time; the tattooed number on his wrist stared back at him, mocking him.
But they had not taken all of Netanel Rosenberg’s possessions. He felt the sharp spines of the David Star bite into his palm. He hid it away under the sacking of his bed.
The lights flickered on and off twice more during the night; it seemed like another hundred men relieved themselves into the bucket; others ground their teeth and whimpered in fitful sleep.
It was still night when they the guards shook them from their beds and herded them into the assembly square, the Appelplatz, for roll-call. Harassed and pummeled, they were lined up in columns of five, four deep, blocks of twenty, groups of one hundred.
Brutality and order, Netanel thought. The rocks on which our new Germany has been founded.
The Orphan was waiting for them. He was not an appetizing sight at this time of the morning. I wonder where they found this one? The Hamburg docks probably. He had the face of a boxer and the small, bright eyes of a predator. Like them, he wore a striped uniform and cap, but instead of the red and yellow Jewish star, he had the green triangle that meant he had been detained here for being a criminal - it was infinitely better to be a gangster, in the eyes of the Nazis at least, than to be a Jew.
He wore good leather boots and he was holding a solid rubber truncheon.
He slapped it in his palm as he addressed them. “Well, meine Herren, welcome to Auschwitz. You Häftlinge, you dirty Jews, you’ve had it good long enough while good Reichsdeutscher like me have been starving for a crust of bread. Well, Herrgottsacrament, the wheel has turned and now you will find out what it’s like to do an honest day’s work. Do any of you have a degree from university?”
A man in the front row half raised a hand in the air. Dov, standing beside Netanel in the second row, uttered a soft, low moan.
The Orphan stepped forward, brought his club up from the level of his knees and into the man’s groin. The man uttered a shrill scream and fell to his knees. The club came down on the back of his skull. He crumpled over on his side.
The Orphan rolled the man on to his back, put his boot on his throat and held it there. The man gurgled and died right in front of them.
“This is what I think of intellectuals,” the Orphan said. “So don’t ever try and make a fool out of me.”
The man was dragged away and roll-call began. The body was accounted for. It did not matter that one of them had died, only that none of them had escaped.
Netanel was stunned. It was not the violence - he had seen the SS and the Brownshirts in action first hand, and he knew what men like that were capable of - it was the casual indifference of it that appalled him. Three precise movements and it was over, without passion and without anger. The Orphan had killed him just to make a point. Nine of the SS in the Appelplatz had even bothered to turn around and watch. It was just routine.
“Does he kill one of us every morning?” Netanel whispered to Dov.
“No, only when he has High Numbers to impress. You know how he got his name, the Orphan? He murdered his mother and father. With an axe.”
How can anyone hope to survive in here? Netanel thought. The psychopaths are the guards and the sane are their prisoners.
The roll-call went on for hour after hour. The numbers were counted off in blocks by the kapos, and were then checked and re-checked with the SS officers. Meanwhile they stood in their lines, dull from sleep and shivering with cold, waiting for the next torment.
Dawn was leeching shape into the world when the roll-call finished. He got his first glimpse of his new home; the camp was like a small city, with endless streets of barrack buildings encircled by watchtowers and barbed wire. A charred shape on the wire resolved into the blackened remains of one of the prisoners who had thrown themselves on the electrified fence during the night.
They were formed into work squads, Arbeitskommandos, and were marched off to work. Netanel thought he heard a band playing the sentimental marching tune “Rosamunda”. Delirium. But when he turned around there they were, men in drab uniforms like himself, with violins and trumpets and a drum, formed up by the gate to farewell them, as if they were regiments marching off to some patriotic war.
As they passed under the gates the Orphan cried, “Mitze
n ab!' and they all removed their caps in deference to the SS guards waiting with their dogs to escort them to work. Netanel looked over his shoulder and saw the legend on the wrought iron front gates:
AND YOUR LABOURS SHALL SET YOU FREE
I shall make my own freedom, somehow.
Netanel learned quickly.
He learned to save half his bread from the breakfast ration to eat mid-morning at the Farben factory when he was so faint from carrying the heavy clay tiles that black spots danced in front of his eyes and he wanted only to sink to his knees and die.
He learned to ignore the stench and the flies and eat it in secret in the latrine, so no one would try to steal some of it as he ate.
He learned to judge when the night bucket in the barracks was almost full, so he would not be the last one there and be required to go to the latrines in the middle of the night and empty it.
He learned always to remove his cap when an SS guard passed by so he would not be beaten.
He learned always to roll up his sleeve and show the number tattooed on his wrist to receive his food ration.
He learned never to draw attention to himself.
He learned to say ‘Jawohl!' whenever any instruction was issued to him.
He learned to judge the best place to be in the soup line by the size of the vat.
He learned that if he left his spoon or his shirt or his bread ration unguarded, even for a moment, it would be stolen.
He learned to make a bundle of all his belongings, from his tin bowl to his wooden shoes, and sleep on it at night.
He learned that everything was valuable; any rag, no matter how inconsequential or how filthy, could be used as a towel or for extra padding inside clogs to protect the feet.
He learned never to think about tomorrow.
He learned to try not to think at all.
But there was still one more important lesson to learn, and he learned it from Amos Mandelbaum.
Every morning at reveille Netanel dressed quickly so as not to leave anything unguarded. Almost immediately the room sweepers drove them out, shoving them with their brooms, turning the air opaque with dust. Netanel stumbled to the latrines and washrooms. They had five minutes at most before the morning rations of coffee and bread were issued, and latecomers received nothing at all. Netanel saw one man urinate as he ran, to save time.
Freedom (Jerusalem) Page 9
