Here to Stay

by John Hersey

  Someone locked, from the outside, the door of the car into which the Stirners had been put. The car was bare but for a latrine bucket. There was a small hole in one wall about the size of a man’s fist, for ventilation. The sixty people in the car were of all ages—men, women, and about a dozen children. On the whole the Stirners were in fair spirits because they had managed to cling to a group of old friends from the Jewish youth organization to which they had belonged. Lena said, as she had many times before, that she feared only one thing: separation.

  Stirner wore a wrist watch, and he noticed that the train pulled out of the Quitzowstrasse station on the dot of four; a schedule was being faithfully followed, it seemed.

  The people in the car tried to keep track of their route by reading station signs through the ventilator hole; all they could tell was that they were moving eastward but not on main lines—they could not flatter themselves that they were priority traffic. Rose Stirner wrote post cards to friends (“We are going to the east. We are in a good mood. Keep strong.”) and threw them from the hole. Cards from previous transports had been picked up, mailed, and delivered. Jacob behaved well; he was curious about everything. When it became apparent that they were going toward Silesia, Lena and Zinfred talked about their wedding trip, which had been to Silesia, in 1938. They and their youth-movement friends talked of mutual acquaintances who were safely abroad, and they speculated about how long they would have to stay where they were going.

  One young man struck up an old song from the movement: “How good it is when friends sit together….”

  Darkness fell outside. When someone remarked that it was Friday, the Sabbath eve, a woman took a candle from a bundle, and she lit it, weeping, as the whole car watched in silence. An elderly man said prayers, and though the Stirners had not been Orthodox Jews, they were deeply moved.

  The next morning a passenger at the ventilator hole saw the station sign at Katowice, and the people in the car concluded that they were destined for Oswiecim—for Auschwitz. About this relatively new camp they had heard little.

  On March 12, at exactly four o’clock, the train stopped in Oswiecim station. Everyone in the car was quiet. Lena took her husband’s hand. It was obvious to both of them that the next few minutes would be of the utmost importance.

  * * *

  —

  After a short time the door of the cattle car slid back, and the Stirners saw an open field, with a number of SS officers and soldiers in a cluster, a couple of whom stepped to the car door and ordered the Jews out. Most of the passengers were stiff from their long ride in the car, but the soldiers hurried and jostled them, far more abrupt and harsh than the SS troops in Berlin.

  Everyone was ordered to put his hand luggage on a big pile. That was the last Stirner ever saw of the family’s prudent knapsacks.

  Next an officer shouted that they should form into three groups—able-bodied men to the left; women without children to the center; women with children, old people, and the sick to the right.

  Lena said, “This is what I have feared the whole time.”

  She kissed her husband, and he kissed their son.

  “Keep strong, Lena,” Alfred said. “I’ll be with you.”

  As they separated, Lena and Alfred tried to keep sight of each other, but Stirner soon lost track of his wife in the big crowd.

  All the able-bodied men were formed in squads of five, and slowly these squads filed past a gigantic officer. He asked two questions of each man and, depending on the answers, turned his thumb up or down.

  When Stirner came before him the big officer asked, “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “What is your profession?”

  “Welder.”

  The thick thumb turned up.

  Herded with the Thumb-ups, Stirner looked around, trying to gather impressions. Large trucks were driving up and closing in on the group. Gangs of men in striped uniforms and caps, under guard, were sent in to clean the freight cars. They carried out the slop buckets and, to Stirner’s surprise, several corpses. Then Stirner noticed that the trucks were being loaded with evacuees from the far group—women and children, the old and the sick, and men and women, as well, from the flock of Thumb-downs. He craned for a sight of Lena, and as one truck drove off he saw that she had managed to get a place near its rear. She saw him. She waved and beckoned to him in a pleading sort of way, though she seemed to be smiling. She made Jacob wave, but the boy could not see his father in the crowd.

  The remaining childless women were marching off in military formation, under the barking of female SS troops—the first Stirner had ever seen—in uniform with revolvers bouncing on their hips.

  Later the trucks came back, and the SS men, bristling and snarling in the most astonishing manner, as if they were threatened animals rather than masters, crowded the men in Stirner’s group into them. When Stirner’s truck seemed to be full, the troopers knocked the passengers forward with rifle butts and mashed in twenty more. The men could scarcely breathe.

  The trucks carried the men in a different direction from the one in which the others had taken Lena’s category. Stirner tried to talk with two SS guards standing on the running board, but they understood German poorly; some Jews who spoke Slavic languages reported that the guards were Polish Volksdeutsche. The convoy drove through a Polish town, past a tremendous plant that was being built—larger than the Leuna works or any other factory Stirner had ever seen—and then the trucks swung around a sharp curve alongside a huge camp of many wooden barracks in rows, surrounded by double barbed-wire fences strung on porcelain insulators. Along the fences there were several wooden towers, in which Stirner could see soldiers with automatic guns.

  As the trucks drove in through a heavily guarded gate, Stirner turned to two of his youth-movement friends, named Kollin and Wertheim, and said in a whisper, “May God help us to get out of here alive!”

  * * *

  —

  The trucks drove into the camp and stopped, the soldiers ordered the men out, and an official came along in a uniform of a style Stirner had never seen—military boots, green riding breeches and jacket, army cap, and a brassard bearing the initials L.A., for Lager Ältester, or Camp Elder. It was nearly dark. The Ältester and other officials in uniforms like his ordered the men into a barren brick barrack and told them to wait. While they stood around, exchanging speculative whispers, they heard a handbell ring. The officials ordered a group of about twenty to move into an adjacent room. Certain officials circulated among those who remained and offered food in exchange for valuables. Stirner, hungry as he was, kept his watch and ring.

  Other squads were moved into the next room, and in time Stirner’s turn came. His group filed past a huge trunk, where two SS men ordered the evacuees to drop their watches, rings, money, and all they had of value. When one man protested, Stirner heard a soldier say in a matter-of-fact tone, “Here one needs nothing.” Next the evacuees were ordered to remove all their clothing, and guards took from them everything except glasses, belts, and shoes. Barbers went among the two-hundred-odd naked men and with hand clippers cut off head and body hair. Attendants sprayed the captives with a harsh disinfectant solution, and the naked men were herded into large shower rooms, where they had to wait some time in the March cold. There had been vague rumors in Berlin about the concentration camp “showers,” that they were gas chambers, and one man made everyone nervous by shouting, “It’s all finished now.”

  While the men were waiting in the shower room, they saw some people moving about on errands in striped uniforms. The group around Stirner stopped one of them, and a man asked, “Where are we?”

  “You have arrived,” the man said without emotion, “in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Did you see the big plant as you came in? That’s an I. G. Farben factory for metanol and buna where you will work. Now you are Häftlinge—inmates. That’s your si
tuation.”

  Someone asked, “What about our women and children?”

  The man—Stirner later learned that he was one of the great Nazi-fighters of Hamburg—said in a low voice, “Don’t worry about your women and children. They have to make their own way. Here you have your way. And if you think over and over what you cannot change, then you will not find sufficient strength for your own struggle here. If you want to come out, obey my advice. Otherwise you’ll never be strong enough. Some of us have been inmates many years already. We’ve been in Buchenwald, Dachau, Oranienburg, and during this time you have had the luck to live with your families. Think that you have come much later and been very lucky, and keep strong.”

  Cold water began eventually to spout from the showers. Since the men were cold already, they could stand it, and it even seemed to warm them a bit; afterwards there were no towels. Officials gave them ragged underdrawers and undershirts, and striped pants and jackets such as the Hamburg anti-Nazi had been wearing. Everything took a long time. Finally the men marched far through the cold to various barracks.

  Stirner, assigned to Barrack Two, was received there by an official called a Blockältester, who took him and his barrack-mates inside a wooden hall about ninety feet long and fifteen feet wide that contained nothing but wooden bunks, in three lengthwise tiers, three deep. Stirner and his youth-movement friends, Kollin and Wertheim and some others, had managed to hang together, and they climbed into the beds, which consisted only of straw paillasses with two thin blankets on plank shelves, but, although it was late at night, no one seemed to be able to sleep. Stirner shivered all night.

  * * *

  —

  Next morning the inmates were rallied from their shelves at four-thirty and were led through sleet to a washroom, a brick shed with eight spigots, in which hundreds of men milled about fighting to get to the faucets. “Keep yourselves clean,” the Blockältester had said on sending them off. “That’s what we want you to do.” They had no soap, towels, toothbrushes, or toothpaste, and they were obliged to carry all their so-called clothes all the time, since there were no cupboards or even hooks in the barrack. Those who were too weak simply did not get washed.

  Afterwards the inmates went back to the barrack and were told to wait outdoors—in order, the Blockältester said, not to dirty their nest—and finally they were marched to a large open field, toward which the whole camp seemed to be moving, and where they were formed into squares, in rows of fives. They stood in their thin jackets and pants in the sleet for an interminable time while SS men went down the squares counting; the troopers reported to a desk set up in the road beside the field and handed in their tallies. At length the camp commander, a Hauptsturmführer SS dressed in a fur coat, came to the desk, and the Rapportführer, the functionary responsible for the roll call, shouted, “Häftlinge stillgestanden!”—calling the inmates to attention. There was a long discussion at the desk; the figures were awry; squares were recounted. At last the roll call was dismissed.

  Stirner and his fellow newcomers were led back to their barracks to register, that is to say, to file past an official who, pricking with a needle dipped in tinted solution, tattooed onto each man’s forearm a number that would serve from then on in place of his name. Stirner was favored with the number 107907, crudely marked slantwise across his arm. Next, the line went by a couple of officials who asked Stirner, in his turn, for his number and his profession.

  “Skilled welder.”

  The men peered at Stirner’s fine glasses, a scholar’s spectacles rimmed with artificial gold, and questioned him about his experience. He insisted that he followed that trade and did not mention having been a law student or a social worker, and shaking their heads they put him down as what he said.

  Next he received his number stamped upon two swatches of white linen, one to go on his jacket, one on his pants; and, on separate swatches, a pair of stars formed from two triangles, red and yellow. Stirner had already noticed that all the inmates and many of the officials at Auschwitz wore triangles, and he learned now that red stood for political prisoner, yellow for Jew, black for antisocial element, and green for criminal. Apart from the Jews, there were few reds; most were greens.

  When the registration of the newcomers was completed, it was time for another roll call. Stirner was informed by an old inmate that there were two roll calls every day; this being Sunday, the second came before the midday meal, and it was as tedious, as cold, as confused as the first.

  Now Stirner was treated to his first meal, apart from the snacks Lena had packed in the knapsacks, since Berlin. He formed in line and filed through the day room of Barrack Two—the room at the end in which the Blockältester and his assistant, together with two or three other privileged senior inmates, lived. The second-in-command of the barrack, the Stubendienst, served the meal from big kettles, and he gave Stirner a rusty basin in which lay a shallow swamp of pasty gray gravy. He was told to hold out his cap, and several boiled potatoes were put into it. He was handed a spoon with which to eat. The line moved into the main hall of the barrack, and the inmates ate sitting on the edges of the bunks.

  Sunday afternoon was free, and Stirner moved about seeking out acquaintances from other barracks. Some inmates, who had been around awhile, telling of their days, said the work was frightfully hard, but—with a shrug—they were alive. There were no papers, no books, no radios, no stationery; there was nothing to do but talk and talk. Stirner quickly learned not to approach the German green triangles, the criminals, who were haughty as noblemen. There was even an attitude of superiority on the part of some of the senior Jewish inmates, who were known as “prominents,” and who could be identified by the cleanliness of their uniforms. Stirner kept thinking about Lena and Jacob, and he tried to visualize their going through the same trials as he. At one point he asked a prominent about the women and children, and the man brusquely said, “We’ve been in this business for years, and we’ve never asked about our relatives.”

  The Häftlinge had been told they could not go to bed before the official hour. Late in the day the newcomers heard the handbell they had heard the day before—it was the curfew bell, knelling their retirement to barracks. No more food was to be served that day. On his bunk Stirner drifted in shallow naps.

  * * *

  —

  The ground was frozen next morning. It was still dark when the inmates huddled into the washrooms, and Stirner had a cold, as had most of his fellow newcomers. This morning, after the washing period, the Stubendienst served breakfast outside the barrack: a chunk of bread, a dab of margarine, a thin wafer of Wurst, and a cup of ersatz coffee; and as each man received his meal his number was checked off, to prevent his going around twice. While they ate, the inmates stood in tight clumps, like sheep, for warmth.

  At dawn the inmates were marched off for roll call on the frozen parade ground, where the wind sifted through their thin uniforms, and the counting seemed to last forever. At the end the inmates were ordered to form into labor gangs, known as Arbeitskommandos, and all the newcomers—Stirner did not realize this until later—were dragooned into the hardest Kommando, which was Number Four, evidently according to a definite policy of weeding out the weaklings through exhaustion and death. Each Kommando was divided into squads, and each squad was under a Kapo—the etymology of which term Stirner never figured out—who held the fates of his workers in his hands. Most Kapos at that time were German or Polish green triangles, the criminal inmates.

  Kommando Number Four consisted of more than three hundred inmates, as was ascertained by three successive counts, and it was marched to a gate, where its members, after removing their hats at an order, were counted yet again. Then they filed across the perimeter roadway into a huge area where several buildings were under construction. Railway tracks led into the area from one side. There were no proper paths or roads; it was a great yard of mud. Kommando Number Four trudged half an hour, so large was the enc
losure, to its far side, hemmed in all the way by a cordon of SS troops who tried to enforce military regularity on the sloshing men.

  The inmates were told to strip off their striped jackets, and in undershirts they were ordered to unload bags of cement from a long line of railway cars and to carry them by hand to a large dump. The Kapos and the SS men kept shouting that the whole train must be cleared by noon, and the Kapos had sticks with which they belabored men who seemed not to be overreaching themselves. Stirner’s clothes grew heavy with cement powder, the dust worked into his skin, and he became fatigued, but his work in the labor gang in Berlin had put him in better condition than many others. During the morning he saw his first death in Auschwitz: a Dutch Jew who threw himself under the wheels of a shunting engine on a siding near the cement train.

  By noon the train was still not wholly unloaded. Kitchen trucks drove into the plant area and each Häftling received a bowl of soup, which he ate as he stood. After half an hour work commenced again. When the train was empty the Kapos shouted that the inmates should push it out of the siding, whereupon three hundred men put their shoulders to the cars, but they could not move the train. The Kapos grew furious and beat several inmates, and only then was it discovered that the brakes were fastened; upon their release, the inmates moved the train with ease.

  Another train, loaded with steel I-beams, rolled into the same spur of track, and Kommando Number Four was put to work unloading it. Stirner had done this kind of work in Berlin; there he had had a pad to put on his shoulder to cushion the load. He picked up a piece of cement bag and folded it and put it on his shoulder, but an SS man took it away. Still, he knew how to time his steps with those of his partners and ease the jolting of steel on bone.