by John Hersey
The first day’s work—and each day’s thereafter for those who survived—lasted from seven in the morning until six at night. When work was over, Kommando Number Four was counted; all the Kommandos formed in parade ranks in the factory area and were counted; they marched, singing at the Kapos’ demand a German marching song, to the gate, where they took their hats off and were counted; and inside the camp they reported for roll call and were counted.
After roll call, Stirner and his companions repaired to their own barrack, went to the washroom and fought with hundreds of inmates over the eight faucets, to try to clean off the cement dust. Back at the barrack they wanted only to fall into bed, but they had to submit to a lice search, a check of their numbers, and bunk inspection. Each was served a liter of soup in a rusty bowl, and some beets and sauerkraut. Then they went to bed in their cement-caked clothes.
* * *
—
Several newcomers fell dead at the roll call the next morning, their third at Auschwitz, and from then on, for three weeks, death was commonplace on the chilly parade ground. Stirner had heard an old hand say that if one lived through his first month at a concentration camp, one might live forever.
When a man collapsed at roll call, an SS trooper would prod him with his foot to see whether he was dead, and only after roll call could friends remove the sick man, if he was still living. There were several hospital barracks, but even inmates with pneumonia were granted no more than three or four days in bed, without medication, before they were sent back to work.
On the fourth day Stirner witnessed the death of an acquaintance—a famous cantor he knew from Berlin named Winter, who had swiftly lost his resistance; he fell at roll call, and when an SS man kicked him, he moved but could not rise. After dismissal, Stirner and two friends picked Winter up and started for the hospital barracks. Winter was delirious. It was a long way to the infirmary area, and on the way the cantor died. The men put the body down at once, for they knew they must save their own energies, and one of them said, “Think how many people have taken pleasure from that man’s voice.”
Stirner found the first days shocking, but he withstood them. His cold even improved; he felt he must have been stronger than he had known in Berlin. The mornings at Auschwitz were frigid, but the days were sunny, and at every hour his friends Kollin and Wertheim were near him.
* * *
—
On the eleventh day a worsening came. The weather turned to water; the rain pounded. There was mud everywhere, and shoes dragged, and Stirner’s Kommando still worked outdoors, and he was soaked all the time, and the paper of the cement bags grew wet, and the bags broke, and the Kapos were insanely furious, but there was no way to prevent any of it. In the evenings Stirner staggered home covered with water, mud, and wet cement. No way could be found to get dry or clean; he started each new day wet and filthy, ended it so, slept so, and ran so in his nightmares. He developed an infection in his right foot.
Now marching out and back was painful. The morning march was known as suicide time, for the inmates had been warned that attempts to escape would earn death, and thus an easy way to put an end to things was to break out from the SS cordon while parading across the plant area; the guards, who received twenty marks and three days’ holiday for preventing an escape, always shot a breakaway down within a few feet. In the evenings the inmates were too weary even to bother to get themselves killed. They walked by twos and threes, leaning against each other, supporting weak friends, all the while singing marching songs under duress from the Kapos. The Jews were forced to carry back their dead, and the bodies were placed in their regular places at roll call and were counted one last time along with the living.
It seemed as if every official had the right to beat an inmate. The SS men in the plant, who were especially cruel, would often strike a man for asking permission to go to the open hole in the ground that served as a latrine. These guards, needing constant nourishment of their belief in tales they had been told of their own supermanhood, were insistent upon subservience—Jews’ humbly taking hats off, keeping three paces away—and they were driven to fury by lassitude and faintness. Stirner saw several feeble men killed by impulsive slaps.
In those wet days Stirner felt himself losing strength. He became obsessed with hunger. If only he could be sated just once! He talked with his friends about food; they devised rich menus. Stirner was always damp, and he was finding it harder and harder to march on his infected foot, and each death he saw made him wonder how long he could carry his load of life.
* * *
—
Then he chanced on a revivification. One day he went to the latrine and he saw, at the edge of the pit, a small square of newspaper that one of the SS guards had evidently intended to use as toilet paper but had left on the ground. Stirner looked around and waited for his chance, and when no guards were watching he stuffed the paper into his underwear pants. He carried it back into camp, and in a corner of his barrack, just before the lights went out, with his friend Kollin standing sentry, he avidly read the few words of print on the square. One of the fragments in a torn column was on military affairs. It seemed the Germans had been pushed back from Stalingrad; they were still at Kharkov.
Stirner trembled with hope when he went to bed that night. He felt it was not so much the scrap of news of German reverses as the glorious act of reading itself that had given him this astonishing sense of flickering vitality. He made wildly optimistic calculations for Russian operations, however, and he thought to himself, “I must try to live for six weeks,” for it was then the end of March, and six weeks would tide him to the warmth of May.
* * *
—
Terrible days followed, however, in which Stirner doubted his capacity to survive. Along with Kollin and Wertheim he was shifted to a digging squad under a German Kapo, whose nickname, “Judenfranz,” had been jokingly given him by SS troops because he was such a grinder of Jews; he was a green triangle who had committed a murder in his home town in Upper Silesia, and he was in charge of ditching for a foundation. Digging in mud with heavy shovels was worse than carrying cement and steel, and Judenfranz would not let his workers sit down during the noon interval; he made them carry their own field kettles; he forced many to surrender their shoes to him in exchange for worse ones from dead men so he might barter the good shoes outside camp. One day he decided to make his men shove small iron dump trucks through mud, rather than along tracks. He had a brute’s fist, which Stirner saw kill several weak men, and Stirner felt he was getting weak.
On the second day of April, in the evening, one of Stirner’s old friends from the Jewish youth movement, a man named Schoenfeld, came to him in despair. Schoenfeld, who had been employed by the Jewish community in Berlin, was a sensitive man once full of music; he had had a warm tenor voice. Now pale and meager, he had been in the hospital for four days with pneumonia and was obviously still sick, and he told Stirner he wanted to kill himself, and he said, “I don’t want to die being kicked.” Stirner dredged up a little strength to argue with him, although he himself had, from time to tired time, given a moment’s thought to a breakaway death. Schoenfeld quieted down.
The next morning, before the bell, there was shooting outside—no great rarity, for in the night and near the dawn it sometimes happened that an inmate would run toward the barbed wire in order to be shot—and Stirner scarcely noticed it. The morning was rainy and cold, and during the march out to the plant Judenfranz began tormenting an elderly Jew who could not march properly, chasing him, pushing him, thrusting him outside the cordon, where he might be shot. The old man got back in and tried to march, but he was feeble; two inmates supported him, and the whole troop sang a marching song gaily in an effort to encourage him. Finally he collapsed. In triumph, disguised as anger, Judenfranz halted his squad.
While the formation was at ease, a man said to Stirner, “Did you hear the shooting this morning?”
Stirner answered, “Yes—anything special?”
“Your friend Schoenfeld,” the inmate said. And he told how Schoenfeld had tried to gain readmittance to the hospital the night before but had been turned away, and how, early in the morning, he had run for the wire and been shot.
Stirner felt a sinking rush of fear, for he realized that his arguments in favor of life had failed. He had a bad day and night. He wondered how long he could resist. At breakfast next morning he fainted. Kollin and Wertheim roused him and supported him to the dawn counting and along the morning march, but he felt shaky all day, and he thought he was near the breaking point.
* * *
—
Three encouragements came in the next few days which, in sum, helped Stirner to keep a grasp on his spirits.
In the first place, the Germans, suffering their first strategic reverses in Russia and North Africa and evidently pressed as never before for manpower, removed part of the SS contingent from Auschwitz, and this meant that during the daytime the camp authorities, instead of keeping a cordon of soldiers around each Kommando and each working squad, were reduced to throwing a peripheral ring around the whole plant area. Since this was immense, embracing more than a hundred buildings, the ring seemed far away; one element of brutality receded from the foreground. Now only the Kapos were on their shoulders—and they were inmates themselves. The withdrawal of the SS gave a special lift to Stirner and his companions under Judenfranz, because the big German had seemed most anxious to please the German soldiers by his prankish persecutions, and now his audience was removed.
Then, one evening, just after mealtime, under a darkling sky, at a time when Stirner, bone-racked and downhearted, was brooding about putting an end to his sufferings, an unexpected bell rang and an extra roll call was ordered. At the desk in the road before the assembled inmates on the parade ground, a civilian alongside the Arbeitsdienstführer, or work commander, announced that each camper was to be registered by profession, especially according to craft skills, if any—as mechanics, locksmiths, tinsmiths, carpenters, and so on—and at Stirner’s turn before the registration desk he announced that he was a welder. This turned out to be simply a registration; nothing came of it. Yet it gave Stirner great hope that he might be excused from the exhausting Kommando Number Four and be put to skilled work, which would be far less exacting.
And, finally, one afternoon, a new batch of Jews arrived in what was described as a transport from Neuendorf; and the following day another transport came from Belgium. Stirner and his companions, who in less than a month had been struck down from two hundred forty to one hundred fifty souls, were suddenly no longer the freshman group. As it was the policy of the camp to visit special hardships on newcomers, so now did the brutalities to the preceding group somewhat abate. Psychologically, also, the arrivals helped Stirner’s crowd, who could now consider themselves experienced Häftlinge, and who could give the advice of iron men to frightened neophytes. Besides, Stirner found several former friends in the Neuendorf transport, most of the members of which were Jews from agricultural projects who had been preparing themselves for Palestine—hard young men with a strong Jewish national feeling. The Belgians meant a lot to Stirner because they brought news from outside Germany, and he spent hours on end questioning them on the strategic positions of the great enemies.
* * *
—
Inspirited by these events, Stirner now began to work at growing stronger. He had learned that men in a concentration camp survived on a margin of a very few calories of surplus energy each day, and that there were certain tricks for hoarding one’s inner warmth.
He had learned, above all, to be watchful, to send his eyes always ranging—on Judenfranz, on other Kapos, on the camp officials—so as to grasp every chance to relax. Five seconds’ rest in every minute meant five minutes’ rest in every hour. He had learned to ask permission to go to the latrine as often as possible without actually rousing suspicion, and to spend the maximum time there; to excuse himself, furthermore, when several others had already gone, because then he would have to wait, at ease, for a free pit.
Even such an act as tearing bread at breakfast was a dangerous waste of energy, and Stirner sharpened one edge of his spoon—his only personal possession, which he kept always in the single pocket on the front of his trouser leg—by rubbing it against a stone in his bunk at night, so that he could easily cut the chunks of bread. (He did this after weighing carefully in his mind the labors needed, on the one hand, for tearing bread and, on the other, for sharpening his alloy spoon and cutting the bread; he concluded that one sharpening would serve many cuttings.) He did not eat all his bread in the morning, as most did, but put some in his pocket, that starch at noon might give him a boost of strength for the afternoon.
Other men’s strength, he observed, was sapped by infection, so he took finicky care of the sore on his foot, keeping it as clean as he could. The cement bags were made of three layers of paper, the middle one of which was quite clean, and he used some of this to bandage his foot, and also as wrapping for his bread, as toilet paper, and to wipe his face clean on rainy days. He felt more and more the psychological importance of cleanliness, and he devised ways of penetrating to the washroom faucets, and once a week, when inmates were allowed to be shaved—by camp barbers, with cold water and dull blades—he always did so, no matter how tired he was.
In the Kommando he now recognized the importance of humoring Judenfranz, for conflict with that loathsome man was a worse drain on an inmate’s strength than the actual labor under the Kapo‘s eyes.
* * *
—
Easter Day of that year, April 25, 1943, was also Alfred Stirner’s thirtieth birthday. The Kommandos were sent out to work as usual in the morning. The sky was pure as a freshwater wellspring, and at one point Stirner had his breath taken away as he saw, in the far distance, blue against dazzling blue, the Beskid Mountains. But the afternoon was free, idle, empty, and appalling. He was thirty. He felt twice that. He thought about Lena and Jacob more than he had for a long time. He was thoroughly daunted.
Then—perhaps because it was Easter—the inmates were given bread for supper, and on each chunk of bread was a glaze of marmalade. “It’s your birthday cake,” Kollin said, and suddenly Stirner felt quite cheerful.
* * *
—
One day in May, Judenfranz abruptly stopped beating the workers in Stirner’s squad. He was as usual surly, and his tongue was abusive, but he kept his hands at his sides. That evening all the camp buzzed with speculation, for all the Kapos at once had abstained from physical violence. This must have been by general order. The inmates could make only one guess—that Germany was now so pressed for manpower that even Jews had a kind of potential value.
This order did not, however, make life suddenly easy. Scores of men from the Neuendorf and Belgian transports wasted and collapsed and died, just as had happened—and, for that matter, was still happening to a lesser extent—among Stirner’s contemporaries. The SS, sensing a reaction of hope among the inmates in response to the Kapos‘ restraint, set out to show the camp that cruelty was still the law. A man who was caught with a pencil was given twenty-five lashes with a whip in front of the roll call one morning. Another who refused to serve as an informer for the camp political department had his hands tied behind his back and was hung up for two hours by the knot.
At this time a transport of six hundred German criminals from the concentration camp at Mauthausen arrived. It appeared that the authorities felt Jews were becoming proportionately too numerous in Auschwitz; for want of Germans and Poles, some of the Jewish prominents had been given administrative jobs. All the Mauthausen green triangles were at once made functionaries. Bad as these men were, they were newcomers themselves, and Stirner, who was beginning to feel like an old survivor in Auschwitz, was not afraid of them.
* * *
—
<
br /> As summer came on, Stirner began to recover a sense of humanness. He had seen such misery and degradation that for a time he had lost all sympathy, except an animal self-sympathy, but now friendships began to be important again. Kollin, who was quiet and temperamental, and Wertheim, an idealist, had been close to him all through the worst times; now he began to widen his circle.
One day Stirner struck up a conversation with a savant of survival, an old hand in Auschwitz, a graduate besides of Buchenwald, and he asked the man’s name. Bernhardt. Stirner recalled that he had met Bernhardt once in the youth movement many years before. Bernhardt, who was from Halle, had been a dentist until he was arrested as a political prisoner in 1938. He was a powerful and energetic man, and, besides having fairly easy work in the plant, he was doing some dental work and had acquired some minor functions in his barrack that earned him extra bread. Dr. Bernhardt undertook a kind of patronage of Stirner, inviting him often to visit his quarters in the evenings and occasionally giving him chunks of bread from his surplus, on which Stirner rapidly began to build a reserve of strength.
Stirner also met an Orthodox Jew from Vienna, another transfer from Buchenwald, who had organized daily rites, morning and evening, for about ten men at a time. Stirner, though not Orthodox in the past, joined them quite often. They gathered unobtrusively, as if for casual talk, in a corner of their barrack, and, while the rest feigned conversation, the man from Vienna murmured prayers that were, in their conspiratorial tone and the sense they gave of common cause, as nourishing as calories.
