Florian's Gate (29 page)

“The water inside the train car had been used up in the first two hours, and afterward we had nothing more. While we were out there on the square, an elderly man was coughing very badly. Somehow he managed to get a soldier to bring him a full bucket of water, and for this he gave the German his gold pocket watch—this was before he had been stripped,
of course. When we were stripped all valuables were taken from us. So the old man drank his fill, and then turned to us and said, anyone who wants can have some. But when we looked we saw that the old man, who had TB, had left the water scummy with coughed-up blood. Even so, many drank from that bucket—that is how thirsty they had become.”

Upon their exit from the building, Jeffrey turned to read the name above the door. It said:
Block 5—Evidence of Crimes.

“While the processing was taking place, the Germans brought forward a prisoner who had arrived earlier,” Alexander continued as they walked toward the next barrack. “I suppose there were already thirteen or fourteen hundred prisoners there when we arrived. They had been there three or four months, from what I gathered later. Auschwitz had formerly been a Polish army camp, and when the Germans arrived they began gathering people from prisons around Cracow and sending them there. The soldiers brought out this prisoner with his harmonica, and from our group they brought out a Catholic priest and a Jewish rabbi. These men were tired, and hungry, and the rabbi with his long beard could barely stand up. They gave them a sheet of paper and told them to sing the words while the prisoner played the harmonica. The words were very obscene; these holy men stood there, forced to sing obscenities, while the guards listened and laughed.”

Block 6 was titled
Prisoners' Life.
In the first hall, black-and-white etchings by former inmates loomed over display cases of passports and family photographs and personal documents. The pictures required no explanation—S.S. soldiers stripping newly arrived inmates of rings, Kapo guards pulling an inmate from line for a beating, new prisoners adding to a mountain of suitcases outside their barrack, prisoners being selected for experimentation.

“At the end of the processing they gave us each a number. My number was one-nine-one-four,
neunzehn-vierzehn.
We were told that if a German or a Kapo came up, we were to
stand at attention and recite,
Politische Schutzhäftling, Pole, neunzehn-vierzehn, meldet heir zur Stelle.
”

Across from the etchings, against a backdrop of barbed wire, a wall display shouted in red letters a foot high the command:
A Jew is permitted one week to live, a priest two, anyone else a maximum of three months.

Alexander examined the display with eyes blind to all but his memories. “There were already a hundred or so Jews here when we arrived. The Germans put them into what was called the
Straff
company. The penalty company. These people had it very, very bad. They were forced to haul this enormous roller around and around the square, while the Germans continually beat them. It was a horrible thing to watch. Horrible.”

The barrack's central hallway was about seventy feet long and lined on both sides with three rows of photographs. Men were to the right, women the left. Beneath the pictures were written their number, their name, their date of birth, their former profession. Jeffrey made out the words for tour guide, teacher, sailor, waiter, lawyer, priest, religious brother, chemist. Beneath the profession was their date of arrival and their date of death.

Their eyes. Their eyes. Jeffrey felt their eyes searching him even when he walked the hall with his own gaze remaining on his feet.

“Every day we were gathered on the central square where they made us go through these extremely difficult, pointless physical exercises. We were already growing weak, and whenever anyone stumbled the Germans would immediately begin beating him. One Kapo hit me over the head with his stick, here, I can still feel the place. The Kapos at that time were all German. We were told that they were criminal prisoners, and under them the men in charge of the barracks rooms were Polish criminals. I can still remember the man in charge of my barracks, a big man, very big, of perhaps forty-five years and
completely bald. His number was four hundred. He carried this great stick with him always, and beat on us constantly.”

At the back of the central hall stood a tall sculpture. It showed six women whose rags covered their heads and little else. They were nothing more than taut skin and staring eyes and jutting bones. The sculpture was entitled
Hunger.

Alexander remained before the statue for quite a long while. “Our normal ration was a soup called
Avo
for lunch, a blackish mixture with perhaps a couple of rotten potatoes. Nothing for breakfast. At night there was so-called tea, water boiled with some unknown leaves, and hard, moldy bread. Bread was the common currency at Auschwitz, bread and cigarettes. The exchange rate was three or four cigarettes for a hunk of bread. People who really craved tobacco would exchange it, knowing full well that they couldn't last without food, and not really caring all that much. For some, the hunger for cigarettes was stronger than for food, especially as life lost its meaning. Then, when someone smoked a cigarette, they would inhale and then blow the smoke into the mouth of a friend. He would in turn blow it into the mouth of a third man.”

One room was dedicated to children. Jeffrey refused to enter. Alexander stopped a few paces inside, turned back with a look of addled confusion, then shrugged his accord and led them down the hall, out of the building, and on to the next barrack. The sign above the door announced that it held a display of how prisoners lived.

“In our barracks room there were one hundred and seventy men,” Alexander told him as they entered. “It was so tight that we were forced to sleep on our sides, and when one turned, all were forced to turn with him. No beds. We were sleeping on the floor, with only straw between us and the concrete floor. In the mornings we were kicked and beaten outside to the hand pump, where we were supposed to have our only wash of the day. One hundred and seventy men
around a hand pump, with the Kapos beating us to make us hurry.

“One time I was late, maybe five minutes late coming out of the barracks. The Kapo marked my number, and about two weeks later a Gestapo soldier came up and called out five or six numbers, mine being one of them. We were penalized because we had been late coming out of the barracks. The punishment was something terrible. He stood there in the concrete corridor inside our barracks with a horsewhip and ordered us through truly horrible gymnastics for over two hours. Whenever we stumbled we were kicked and whipped until we were unconscious. One of the five men punished with me was killed, murdered, beaten to death right there before our eyes. I received one kick in the small of my back, on my kidneys, that I truly thought had killed me too.”

Inside the barracks the central hall held two more walls of eyes. Jeffrey checked the professions in an attempt to escape the stares—seamstress, mayor, bureaucrat, blacksmith, activist. The wall opened for a doorway that framed a brick-sided barracks room as it was in 1944. Straw was laid beneath blanket rags. Three tiers of wooden beds rose like animal stalls in a room less than six feet high. The stalls were perhaps four feet wide. A sign by the doorway said that eight women slept in each of the four-foot-wide tiers. A thousand women to a barrack.

“After a time,” Alexander said beside him, “they began marching us a mile or so every morning to the building site of Birkenau. This was the second stage of the Auschwitz death camp, and the larger one. I was ordered up on top of very steep roofs—I don't know what they had been before they were turned into Birkenau—and I cleaned them with a stiff wire brush. It was extremely steep, very dangerous work. One day a man working beside me fell to his death.”

Block 10 was closed and the door barred. Beside the door a sign read:
In this block the German physician, Professor Clauberg M.D., conducted experiments dealing with the
sterilization of women
. Three women knelt on the steps and prayed, candles lit before them.

“One morning while at work at Birkenau I happened upon some rotten potatoes. You must understand that by that time hunger was a ruling force in my life. It dominated my daily existence. Several of us there together swiftly gathered them up. It was approaching winter by that time, so we took these potatoes and put them on a fire there at the work site. While we were watching them, a German came up. All the others fled, but I was caught, and the German demanded to know who they were, these others who had been cooking potatoes instead of working. When I refused to tell him, he sent a Kapo to fetch him a special stick. It was very heavy, almost as thick as my forearm, and had nails hammered into it to give it extra weight. He ordered the Kapo to take my head between his legs, and then he began to beat me on my back and thighs. I was supposed to get twenty-five blows. On the eighth stroke he hit me on the kidneys, and I lost consciousness.”

Beside Block 10, metal gates opened to a graveled courtyard. At its end was a bullet-ridden concrete wall, the Death Wall. Row after row of flowers and candles and wreaths and cards were set at its base.

“Every day, sometimes several times a day, they would tie a man's hands behind his back, and pull him upward on a tall post until his feet left the ground, suspended with his arms pulled back and up from behind. They were left hanging for two, sometimes three hours. The pain was indescribable. People who went through it told me afterward that they would rather die than endure it again.”

The neighboring block contained a large room with a line of simple wooden tables. A sign described it as the camp court, and said that almost all who were tried here were executed. Immediately.

Two opposing rooms were assigned for male and female prisoners to strip naked before being led outside to be shot.
The sign above the men's chamber said that most had their hands bound with barbed wire.

“One day a pair of prisoners escaped, and we were forced to stand in the square until they were found. Eighteen hours we stood there, in the dead of winter. Any time anyone fell, he was beaten and kicked to the point of death. Eventually the guards found the fugitives, and they were punished with the Standing Cells.”

In the cellar were the Standing Cells, arrived at through a barred crawl-space perhaps two feet square. Four prisoners were crammed into a space three feet wide, three feet long, and four feet high. Those placed there for trying to escape, according to the sign above the first cell, were left to starve to death.

“They had a crematorium already in operation. The prisoners knew about it, of course. Even I, as a sixteen-year-old boy, learned what was happening there beyond the wires. But many were already seeking a way to commit suicide. Many men threw themselves against the barbed-wire fence so the Germans would shoot and kill them. For many of the prisoners, death was preferable to an endless stay in this living hell.”

Across from the Standing Cells was the first experimental gas chamber. Another chamber at the end of the cellar hall was the Death Cell, where prisoners were held before being placed inside the gas chamber. On one wall of this room, a prisoner awaiting death had carved the figure of Christ. Alexander stood there for a long time before turning and leading Jeffrey back upstairs.

At the turning that led away from Block 10, the walkways and window ledges were filled with modern-day casualties of Auschwitz; men and women, boys and girls, knelt and wept and prayed or just stared with blank-faced blindness at the passers-by whose legs would still carry them. The eyes of those crippled by what they had witnessed resembled those of the prisoners whose photographs hung within.

Alexander led him through the barracks dedicated to the
Poles who died in Auschwitz and to the Polish war effort. He then turned down the path and led them out the gates to the main gas chamber and crematorium. They were located beyond the camp's perimeter fences in a smaller enclosure all their own. The entrance was a stone-walled path leading into the side of an earth-walled bunker.

The death chamber was a tomb of concrete, where 800 prisoners were gassed at a time. The next chamber held row after row of curved brick furnaces. Candles and flowers were strewn in the long metal trays used to pass in the bodies and bring out the ashes.

A guide standing beside Jeffrey told his group that the Nazis would notify the families of Poles who had been killed, saying that the relative had passed on of a heart attack, and that his or her remains could be collected upon making a payment. Whenever anyone appeared with the money, they would shovel up a boxful of ashes from whomever had just been incinerated.

Alexander led Jeffrey out into the bright sunlight and back to where their car and driver waited. The narrative continued as his softly droning voice kept them company on the journey back to Cracow.

“As soon as my mother learned of my arrest, she began seeking my release. My father was one of the commanders of the Polish forces fighting under General Anders, in the Polish Second Corps under British command, and my mother remained in Cracow all alone. Someone told her to go to the Gestapo headquarters, and time and again she went and pleaded with anyone who would listen to tell her news of her son. She was repeatedly thrown out on the street, just tossed out the door and down the stairs like refuse. But she kept returning.

“Then someone else told her that there was a German lawyer with connections. If she could get her hands on a thousand zloty, he would help her. So my mother sold her rings and went to this German; he took my name and promised he
would do what he could. To this day, I don't know exactly who it was that in the end worked out my release. I don't know how many people my mother spoke to and pleaded with. But I do know that there was a commandant of the Polish police, a good friend of my father's from before the war. He had the responsibility of supervising Polish police in all of Poland under German military command. My mother went to him and pleaded for his help. But whoever helped her never admitted it, and so I have never been able to thank the one responsible for my release. But somehow, somehow, toward the end of January 1941, I was released from Auschwitz.