Prisoner B-3087 (12 page)

That night, in what little sleeping time there was left, I
dreamed that Amon Goeth was chasing me with his
dogs. I ran, and ran, and ran, but I could never quite
get away. Then one of the dogs leaped and bit my left
arm. I woke up screaming and holding my burning
left arm— my left arm where the Nazis had carved
B-3087
into my skin.

after a few months at bIrkenau, we were
told Auschwitz needed workers. Since Auschwitz was
nearby, a sister camp to Birkenau, they marched us
down the road and across the fields to get there. Our
kapo
stopped us at the station, where we waited for
new prisoners to join us. You could tell they were new
because they stepped off the trains in real clothes,
not camp uniforms, with their luggage and children
in tow.

“Why? We were told to bring it with us,” they
argued.
The Nazis promised them it would all be returned
to them in due time, and the new prisoners believed
them. The Nazis loved having new prisoners who
didn’t know what was coming. It amused them. I
could only feel sorry for these new arrivals. They had
no idea the waking nightmare that lay in wait for them.
“Have you heard of Auschwitz?” our
kapo
asked
the new prisoners. “No? Someone’s waiting for you
inside. Do you know who? Death, of course. Death
waits for you. Look and see.”
The new prisoners kept their distance from us veteran prisoners as we were herded toward the main gate.
They looked at us with wide eyes, and pulled their
children away from us. Did we look like monsters to
them? I glanced around at the other prisoners who had
come with me from Birkenau. We were skin and bones,
with shaved heads and shuffling gaits and red skin on
our arms where they’d tattooed us. Our eyes were
sunk into our heads, our ears stuck out like donkey
ears, and we must have smelled wretched, though of
course we’d all been long accustomed to our stench. I
was fifteen— maybe sixteen?— and I looked like a
sixty-year-old man. To these people just off the train,
we all must have looked like escaped mental-asylum
patients with our shaved heads and our wooden shoes
and oversized blue- and gray-striped uniforms.
If only they knew that
this
was what awaited them.
If they weren’t taken right to the gas chambers and the
furnaces.
We passed under the front gates of Auschwitz,
where the German words
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
were written above the gate. I knew enough German
to translate it:
“Work makes you free.”
A smiling SS guard told us a very different story as
we passed. “You come in through the front gate,” he
said, “but the only way out is through the chimney.”
I looked up with the new prisoners to the tops of
the brick chimneys, where a thick black smoke poured
out into the blue-white sky. The crematorium. Little
flecks of gray fluttered down all around us, collecting
on puddles of water in the yard. I watched a little girl
in a blue dress catch one on her tongue like snow. I
didn’t have the heart to tell her it was the ashes of the
people who had come before us.
I recognized the assembly yard before they ever
told us what it was. They all looked the same: a big
muddy field surrounded by barbed-wire fence, with a
bullet-ridden brick wall especially for executions.
Auschwitz prisoners in charge of crowd control organized us into a single-file line. One of them shambled
up the line, whispering urgent advice. “You’re eighteen, you’re in good health, and you have a trade.
You’re eighteen, you’re in good health, and you have a
trade.”
“What?” said the man in front of me. He wore black
trousers and a black vest over a clean white shirt, and
he stood with his wife and their young son. The boy
couldn’t have been more than ten. “What did that man
say? Why should I tell them I’m eighteen?”
“Your boy,” I said. “Tell them your boy is eighteen
and has a trade.”
They recoiled when they saw me, monster that I
was.
See if you don’t look the same in a year
, I thought.
“What? But that’s preposterous. He’s nine. He’s just
a boy,” the woman said.
I left it. A Nazi soldier was walking by, and I wasn’t
going to get caught talking.
We had been lined up so someone at a table up ahead
could process us, and slowly I made my way to the
front. Three Nazi officers sat at the table. The two
officers on the sides wore brown shirts and pants, but
the man in the middle wore the black of a senior officer. He looked immaculate, with a shining black cap,
polished medals, and neat white gloves like a traffic
policeman. No one was so clean in a camp, ever, not
even the camp commandants. This was a man of
importance, I could tell right away. He held a baton in
his right hand, and with a flick of it to the left or right
he was separating the line.
One direction, I knew, would be for the camp work
detail. The other would be for the furnaces.
“Good material this time,” I heard him say as we
got closer.
“Yes, Herr Doctor Mengele,” one of the brownshirts told him.
“Next,” Mengele told the family in front of me.
“How old are you?”
“I am thirty-nine, my wife is thirty-six, and our son
is nine,” the man told Mengele.
“Are you healthy?” Mengele asked the man.
“Y-yes. Only my wife had pneumonia recently, and
she is still weak from it.”
I closed my eyes. The man was telling them too
much, and not the right things.
“Your occupation?” Mengele asked.
“I am a clerk.”
“Not anymore,” Mengele told him. He waved his
baton to the right for the man, and to the left for the
woman and the little boy.
Kapo
s came and pulled them
apart.
“Wait! Where are you taking them?” the man asked,
looking terrified.
“Papa!” the boy cried. He reached for his father, but
an SS officer pulled him and his mother away while
another officer pushed the father to the right.
“Next,” Mengele said to me. “How old are you?”
I stood as tall as I could. “Eighteen,” I lied.
“Are you healthy?”
“As an ox,” I lied again. It was all I could do not to
waver as I stood.
“What is your occupation?”
I could hardly tell them “student.” The man before
had said “clerk,” and he’d been lucky they’d kept him.
“Bricklayer,” I lied again.
Herr Doctor Mengele pointed his baton to the right,
and I joined the ranks of the other men and women
who’d been kept to work. At least I hoped that was
the group I had been assigned to. Beside the new prisoners, the older prisoners like me looked pathetically
weak and incapable of any kind of real labor.
“Where are they taking my wife and son?” the man
who had been ahead of me asked a
kapo
.
The
kapo
cuffed him with his club, making the
man’s lip bleed. “They’re gone to the gas chambers!
Now shut up unless you want to join them.”
For a moment, it looked like the man might say that
he would.
“Save your own life,” someone whispered behind
him. “Just let them go. It’s better for them this way.”
“How can I let them go?” the man cried. “They’re
my family. I love them.”
But he stayed where he was, holding the back of his
hand to his bleeding lip as he wept.
When the selection was finished, one of the brownshirts addressed our group. Herr Doctor Mengele was
done for the day.
“Prisoners!” the brownshirt said. “You are fortunate. You are strong enough to have been selected for
work. Once all the Jews of Europe are collected into
our camps, we will organize a new Jewish state for
you, where you will be free.”
The new prisoners looked at one another hopefully.
Some of them, like the man who’d been in front of me
in line, no doubt thought this meant that his wife and
son were still alive, and just taken to a different part of
the camp. They didn’t know the games the Nazis
played yet. The lies they told us for sport.
“You will be happy to know too that your stay here
in the camp will cost you nothing. All the valuables
you brought with you are at this moment being distributed among the camps, where they will be used
exclusively for the benefit of the Jews.”
Another lie. At Birkenau, we had seen the stockpiles of riches in “Canada,” the camp storehouse. We
had seen how the Nazis made the warehouse their
own personal shopping center before shipping train
car loads of gold and silver back to Berlin.
“Work,” the officer urged us. “Work will set you
free. If you work hard, if you perform your duties
faithfully, you may be attached to the Wehrmacht as
service personnel. From there, you may even earn
positions of authority within the new Jewish state.”
The new prisoners nodded, buying it hook, line,
and sinker. I didn’t have the heart to tell any of the
new Jews it was all a pack of lies when the roll call was
finished and we were sent to our new barracks. No
one did. The new prisoners would learn soon enough,
and they would accept the truth or they would die.
That night as I lay in the middle slot of my threetiered bunk, I heard voices in the distance singing. I
couldn’t believe it, and I lifted my head to hear better.
It was a lullaby my mother had sung to me when I was
a child, but it sounded like it was being sung by a choir.
Had I finally lost my mind? Was I going crazy?
“It’s the women,” the man next to me in the bunk
whispered. “They sing when mothers and their children are taken to the gas chambers.”
I listened to their song, distant and plaintive.
“How often do they sing?” I asked.
“All day,” the man said. “All day, and every night.”