Scheisshaus Luck (18 page)

and when I first heard the name I imagined a peaceful sanitarium where the truckloads of
Muselma¨nner
were nursed back to human beings. What wishful thinking!

On the way back to camp we stopped in the Auschwitz main camp and picked up a load of men’s clothing. There was a shortage of the striped uniforms in our camp, and the SS were supplementing with civilian clothes that had a square piece of striped material stitched on the back. We then made a detour to the Buna plant’s civilian kitchen, where the driver delivered his eels and a bag of unaltered clothes. He came back with a smile and a few packs of Navy Cut, a British brand of cigarettes that an English POW had traded with the cook.

‘‘Gee, they smell delicious,’’ I told the
Kapo
.

‘‘You’re too young to smoke,’’ he said.

‘‘But not too young to burn.’’

He laughed and handed me one.

Loading the truck the next morning, all I could think about was the Jehovah’s Witness. My sleep had been wracked with images of her naked body shivering as hundreds of eels burrowed through her. Feigning sick had crossed my mind, but I feared the
Kapo
’s fury more than watching her be poured out of that sack. I could definitely survive seeing another dead body; another beating was a different story.

My stomach was twisted in knots by the time the truck pulled under the bridge. I carried the smallest corpse I could find down to their fishing spot. The SS driver was in a jolly mood, certain that

‘‘the whore’’ had brought him a prize catch. I closed my eyes as he PART II | AUSCHWITZ

121

and the
Kapo
extracted her. When I heard her body drop on the bank I couldn’t keep my eyes shut any longer. Her mud-streaked corpse glistened in the sun. The ugly welts on her body had receded in the cold water. She sure had put a spell on me, because by the time I heard him, the
Kapo
was screaming in my face.

‘‘Hey shithead, get moving!’’

I struggled to carry her up the embankment. I didn’t care that my ‘‘pajamas’’ got dirty and wet. She deserved better than being dragged by her bluish white ankles, but how I wished that the cold water had closed her milky eyes. Not wanting to stare at her ripped-open belly, I laid her on her stomach. I felt guilty, but I couldn’t help admiring her still firm buttocks. Doubtless she had been a virgin until they dragged her kicking and screaming into that whorehouse. As a final act of desecration, an eel slowly slithered out from under her. I stomped on its head with my heel and ground it to gelatin. The SS driver came up the embankment yodeling. A fat catfish had erred into his sack.

‘‘This one I will keep for myself,’’ he announced.

I looked at the dead eel at my feet and thought, I’ll do the same.

On the way to Birkenau, I hid the eel in the tube that reinforced the side panel of the truck, then sat down next to the girl’s corpse.

‘‘Thanks,’’ I mumbled.

I didn’t even know the name of this decent, fervently religious human being whose God had forsaken her. It was no wonder that I was an atheist. In this place, God validated my choice every day.

Again, the SS ordered me to stand away from the truck as the
Sonderkommando
shuffled through their dance. When two of them turned the girl over, exposing her eviscerated belly, they froze for a second, shook their heads, then resumed their roles. After all the corpses had been removed, the
Sonderkommando
loaded the truck with over forty old cement bags filled with human ashes. They stacked the bags in neat, tight rows to prevent them from spilling.

Once the tailgate was closed I climbed into the bed. When I was eight, an elementary school pal showed me the urn that held the ashes of his grandmother. I had a hard time believing that a 122

SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

canister no bigger than a small coffee can could hold a whole adult.

There had to be at least twenty to twenty-five men, women, and children in each of the cement bags, which meant I was staring at all that was left of one train load of human beings.

As we drove away I peered inside one of them. I had never seen human ashes before. The ashes were grayish brown and coarse like sand, and peppered with blackened pieces of bone. I looked back.

The smoke from the red brick chimneys was beginning to eclipse the sun. Goodbye, you innocent, devout creature. I am sure I’ll see you again in my nightmares.

The truck turned onto a dirt road leading to vast fields of cabbages. We stopped at a patch being tilled by a
Kommando
. The driver blew his horn and yelled at them to unload the truck. As they approached, I realized that the
Ha¨ftlinge
were women—black triangles from the Ukraine. I handed the bags down to them, and a few immediately started spreading the ashes along the rows of cabbages. The Nazis made sure nothing went to waste, and from the looks of those bulging, green heads, we made excellent fertilizer.

I wanted to see if one of the women would circulate a message for Stella through the women’s camps, but none of them spoke any of the languages I spoke. At least seeing that the SS had a use for them bolstered my optimism that I would see Stella again. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that there was a father, perhaps even a boyfriend, who was confident he would see that Jehovah Witness again.

After the women loaded our truck with cabbages meant for our camp’s kitchen, the driver once again stopped at the plant’s civilian kitchen to trade his morning catch, along with a large number of the cabbages. When we arrived at our kitchen I helped unload.

While no one was looking I retrieved my catch. I swapped the eel for a ladle of soup with no questions asked, but I could tell by the way that he eyed me that the cook knew how I got it.

C H A P T E R 1 2

The next day, it was a new
Block
, a new
Kommando,
and new companions. I now was part of a work detail that was digging trenches for the plant’s sewer, water, and heating pipelines. Most of these trenches had to accommodate several pipelines. The digging would go like this: Four to five
Ha¨ftlinge
abreast would swing pickaxes to break up the topsoil as another crew shoveled the dirt out. After having dug about one hundred yards in length and a half-yard in depth, we would take our pickaxes and go back where we started and take off another layer. This procedure would be repeated until we reached the Nazis’ specified depth of two to three yards, depending on the diameter of the pipes. At that depth, platforms were erected to facilitate the extraction of the loose earth.

It was a backbreaking
Kommando
. Every evening there were corpses to carry back to the camp. There was one advantage, however. Since we were digging along the road that led to the civilian factory workers’ kitchen, all the wagons delivering provisions passed right in front of our noses—right above our heads, to be exact. They were loaded with potatoes, a long-forgotten delicacy, or beets or cabbages. Hearing the rattle of the wagons’ ironbound wheels and the clatter of the horses’ hooves, we would first make 123

124

SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

sure we weren’t under the watchful eyes of a
Kapo
or SS guard, then ready ourselves for attack. We would let the wagon pass a short distance, then a chosen
Ha¨ftling
would jump onto the rear and toss to us whatever he could grab.

We did our work on those trenches as slowly as possible. There wouldn’t be any rolling food markets to ‘‘organize’’ from at our next job site. Before heading back to camp in the evening, a few of us would chop at the sides of the trench, and with the help of the night frost and morning thaw, it would be caved in when we returned. Our
Vorarbeiter
, Emile, closed his eyes to all this and naturally got the lion’s share of our bounties, but soon the drivers got wise and passed by us at a gallop. We then started attacking en masse, with our mess tins over our heads to protect ourselves from their whips.

Twice a week, a local peasant came to pick up the ‘‘pig pot,’’ an enormous receptacle kept behind the plant’s kitchen in which the spoiled remnants of the day’s soup were poured. The pig pot was always infested with drowned flies, but it took more than that to turn the stomach of a starving man. The peasant drove his wagon slowly in order not to spill any of the foul liquid. That made it easy for us to fill our mess tins as he passed, but left us unprotected from his whip.

The lash marked us all, and one
Ha¨ftling
even lost an eye from a well-aimed blow. Inevitably one of the drivers complained and Emile was demoted, and we were assigned to a different work detail. Probably for the best, I thought. A few more rancid bowls from the pig pot and we would all have dropped dead from diarrhea or hepatitis.

♦ ♦ ♦

Many times while I dug those ditches, standing ankle-deep in cold mud, I would think about my brief stint in the Resistance. I would chide myself for never seeing action in a raid and for having landed in Auschwitz because of lousy luck and not for my efforts in the Maquis.

My involvement in the underground started in 1941, when I was fifteen years old. At that time, Southern France was under the rule of the Vichy government, a puppet regime of the Germans.

PART II | AUSCHWITZ

125

Nazi troops occupied only the northern half of France. Menard, my neighborhood’s black marketeer, was the one who steered me to the Maquis. He had made a king’s ransom after the Nazi’s blitzkrieg by collecting the abandoned cars of those who fled and selling them for parts. I would always give him an earful of my anti-fascist rants when he came over to have a coffee with my father. After seeing the split lip and black eye a school bully gave me for cheering the sink-ing of the Nazi battleship
Bismarck
, Menard pulled me aside. He told me to meet an elderly gentleman who was interested in talking to me at a bench on the Promenade des Anglais, which ran along the Mediterranean coast.

Adrenaline pumped through my heart when I spotted an old man in a well-tailored suit and fedora feeding the gulls. It wasn’t the suit, the hat, or the bird feeding that identified my contact, but his
gueule casseé,
a facial disfigurement that was a souvenir from the WW I Battle of Verdun.

‘‘Bonjour, mon capitaine.’’

‘‘Drop the title, it attracts attention. Call me Mr. Meffre,’’ he said as we shook hands.

I sat down next to him as he resumed feeding the gulls. ‘‘We need a messenger with strong legs and a bicycle.’’

‘‘I have both.’’ I was working after school at a bicycle shop a few blocks from my house.

‘‘When I need you, we will meet here. You’ll meet nobody else.

Understand?’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘I’ll tell you where to hide or deliver the messages. Don’t bother trying to decipher these messages. You won’t be able to, and the less you know the better off you will be. Do not tell a soul, not even your family, what you’re doing. The Germans and Italians are easy to fool, son; it’s our traitors and collaborators you have to worry about.’’ Mr. Meffre got up and shook my hand. ‘‘If we win this war you might get a medal, but if we lose they will hunt you down as a saboteur and a traitor.’’

On my first few trips I tied my fishing tackle to the bike and hid the messages in a double-bottomed can of worms. Then I realized 126

SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

the merits of my tire pump. When I had a girlfriend with strong legs, I would borrow a tandem bike from the shop. We would pedal off on an outing, a movie, or a picnic that included wine and fooling around, and I would deliver a message. I had a good idea that most of these messages pertained to the organizing of different cells around southern France.

In 1943, when Nazi troops occupied all of France, Meffre called a meeting. ‘‘Are you circumcised?’’ he asked me, as he tossed stale bread to impatient gulls. He was happy to hear I wasn’t. In the Germans’ hunt for Jews, they were forcing males to drop their pants at checkpoints and roadblocks outside Nice.

Now when I pedaled I wondered if the message I was carrying was the arrival time of a military convoy to be sabotaged or the orders to assassinate some Nazi official or collaborator. Every time I met with Mr. Meffre I hoped it would be the moment he would tell me where to pick up a weapon. If I had had the right gun I could have cut down a hell of a lot of
boches
. My bedroom balcony overlooked a road along a cliff, and every day platoons of German soldiers marched along there fully exposed, a perfect target for a sniper or someone armed with a machine gun. I reported this to Meffre.

‘‘I’m glad to see that you’re this observant, but don’t underesti-mate them. They’re baiting us. At another location outside town they’ve hidden a machine gun nest aimed at a spot where we could easily ambush a patrol. Shooting a couple soldiers would only give them an excuse to burn down the whole city, like they did in Czechoslovakia.’’

‘‘Are we cowards? What good are we doing?’’ I asked.

‘‘Our orders are to lay low until an Allied landing on our coast.’’