Scheisshaus Luck (20 page)

With Germany cut off from the supply of many raw materials, the pipes used in the Buna plant were made of rolled steel or cast iron.

Because they lacked any stainless alloys, it was our job to line the insides of the pipes with plastic to protect them from the corrosive fluids that would flow through. We would coat the insides with an adhesive, using a sponge attached to the end of a long wooden rod, then insert a long sleeve of soft plastic, pressing it against the pipes with a spreader. We would stretch the plastic over the face of the pipes’ flanges, which another shop had welded on. If the flanges were warped from the welding, we would resurface them on a lathe.

Pipes would then be placed in the shop’s kiln to fuse the plastic. It took a half-hour to bake a dozen pipes. Once cooled, we would use drills to clear the plastic out of the flanges’ four assembly holes.

With the plastic covering the flanges there was no need for a gasket when the pipes were bolted together. Many times, once the trenches were dug, we would be the ones to assemble and bury the pipes.

Near my workbench I found a page from a magazine that must have been used as packing material. I figured I could use it as cigarette paper until I saw that it was from a French magazine. There was an ad, a picture of two people, and the last half of an article. I put it under my shirt, and back in my
Block
that night I hid it under my pillow. I must have read that page more than a dozen times that 134

SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

week before it disappeared. It was the first thing I had read in six months. In Drancy, I was able to at least read the newspapers the
gendarmes
had left. Hell, there I had a semblance of a social life. At night we played cards, cracked jokes, listened to someone blowing Glenn Miller’s ‘‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree’’ on the harmon-ica, or a few voices singing the Yiddish tune ‘‘
Bei Mir Bist Du Scho¨n’’

that the Andrews Sisters made popular. It all helped to keep my mind off the fact that I was a prisoner. The only things that kept me from dwelling on my plight in Monowitz were physical exhaustion and unbearable hunger.

One evening, a group of us watched through a window in our
Block
as the orange halo of an immense fire bloomed in the direction of the main camp. Its unusual intensity puzzled us. This was no ordinary blaze. We speculated that a methanol pipeline or tank had ignited. Whatever it was, it burned through the night. At the plant the next morning, I spotted an English POW who had been friendly with me in the past. I asked him if one of their
Blocks
had burned down.

‘‘Oh, no. It was on the other side of our camp. One of our guards told me that the SS had wiped out forty-four thousand Gypsies in one night. The Jerry said they were bragging how efficiently they had done it.’’

‘‘Forty-four thousand? Are you sure it wasn’t forty-four hundred?’’ I asked in my shaky English.

‘‘No, you got it right, chap.’’

We parted without another word.

Forty-four thousand? I knew of the existence of the brown triangle Gypsies, but I had never crossed paths with a single one.

That day I was acutely aware of every SS guard I passed at the plant. They had been so secretive about their slaughters for so long, and now they were brazenly bragging. Was mass murder that easy?

I guess if you can kill one in cold blood, what’s another four or a thousand or forty thousand?

I had become numb to their savagery, and I hated them for doing that to me. I knew I would remember the girl from the Puff, PART II | AUSCHWITZ

135

maybe Mario and Pressburger, but my other fellow
Muselma¨nner
were just faceless cattle in the slaughterhouse.

Rumors circulated for a week about what had happened that night. One was that the Gypsies had been exterminated to make room for skilled
Ha¨ftlinge
from the camps near the Eastern Front.

True or not, it was sobering reminder that there was nothing preventing the SS from processing all of us the same way once they had no use for us. Another was that the crematoriums had broken down that night, and after the Gypsies had been gassed their bodies were torched in open pits along with many arriving Jews.*

The ‘‘prominent’’
Ha¨ftlinge
arriving from the abandoned Eastern Front camps found themselves stripped of their status and privileges. For some this was as good as being sent to the gas chambers.

One morning before roll call I noticed fifteen ‘‘pajamas’’ standing in a circle, yelling obscenities. In the center was a bloodied
Ha¨ftling
screaming for help. He was being pushed and punched from all sides. Grinning and laughing, the guards watched from the fence. I was sure they were taking bets. The man finally collapsed to the ground, and the infuriated ‘‘pajamas’’ kicked him until he was just a bloody mess of broken bones. He was dead or in a coma. Either way, the Transportation
Kommando
would make sure he was on the back of their truck. Out of curiosity, I asked a yellow triangle standing at the circle’s perimeter why they had done him in. He told me the man had been a Jewish policeman in one of the ghettos.

‘‘He was the worst of the bunch. A son of a bitch.’’

Well, if that many guys have decided that he had it coming, he must have deserved it, I thought as I lined up in my
Kommando
.

* On August 2, 1944, 2,897 Roma (Gypsy) men, women, and children were taken from their camp in Birkenau and gassed. Their bodies were incinerated in pits because the crematoriums weren’t functioning at the time.

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C H A P T E R 1 4

After so many false alarms, our first Allied bombardment finally came on an idle August Sunday when we stayed in the camp. I thought that the distant explosions in the plant were butane tanks erupting. Forty English POWs were killed in that raid and a woman’s camp was laid in ruins. An untold number of female
Ha¨ftlinge
had perished, and I couldn’t stop wondering if Stella was among them.

I was cleaning out a new methanol tank that we had just buried and connected to our pipes when the air raid sirens started shrieking once again. As I climbed out of the tank, an Aussie came running over, dragging a pretty young woman dressed in factory coveralls.

‘‘Speak English?’’

‘‘Enough.’’

He handed me a half pack of cigarettes. ‘‘Mate, have some fags and keep an eye open. I need some privacy.’’

The girl nervously fidgeted with her blond locks as she scanned the clouds for any indication of American bombers. Grayish puffs of exploding anti-aircraft shells were dotting the sky.

‘‘My name is Pierre,’’ I told the Aussie.

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‘‘A hell of a time for introductions, mate,’’ he said as he herded the girl into the tank.

I sat down to enjoy one of the ‘‘fags’’ when I realized I needed matches. From the sounds inside the tank, it would have been rude to ask the POW for a light. Bombs began to explode in the distance as I calculated how many cigarettes I could smoke and still have enough for an extra ladle of soup. It wasn’t that I was blaseábout the bombing raid, it just wasn’t the first time I was on the receiving end of an aerial attack.

My baptism under fire was on a sunny day in June 1940. When the German army occupied Paris and the senile Marshal Philippe Pe´tain was ready to sign an armistice, Mussolini, the bold vulture of Rome, wanted to share in the spoils. Proclaiming ‘‘
Niza nostra
’’

(Nice is ours), he declared war. The French and Italian armies watched one another from their mountaintop fortresses, pondering who would fire the first shot while I went fishing for eels to supplement my family’s meager rations.

I pedaled my bike to the Brague River, which is on the way to Cannes, armed with a darning needle, a nine-foot-long bamboo pole, nightcrawlers, and an umbrella. With the darning needle I strung the bait on three-feet of fishing line, then wrapped it into a ball with another three-feet of thread. When the eels went for the juicy worms they would snag their crooked teeth on the thread.

They were hungry that day, and my upturned umbrella was almost filled with the slithering, slimy fish when I noticed an Italian Ca-proni bomber leisurely circling above me. A French Morane fighter burst out of the clouds with machine guns blazing. I watched with awe and fascination until the fighter’s stray bullets whizzed by me, churning up the water. I dropped my pole and hugged a tree, which was raked by rounds. When the planes disappeared behind a hill, I went to retrieve my pole, only to find it shattered. Just as well, I figured, since I was shaking too badly to hold it anyhow.

So, when I saw a squadron of B-17s in a V-formation closing in on the plant from the northwest, I knew hugging a tree wouldn’t do me any good. With the explosion of bombs closing in on me, I PART II | AUSCHWITZ

139

slid down the tank’s ladder. The Aussie was in full action and took no notice of me, but the woman, with her coveralls at her knees, was horrified and tried to hide her face. The tank began to quake from the bombs’ shock waves.

‘‘Baby, don’t worry, it’s only friendly fire. I’ve got you covered.

I’m on top,’’ he joked.

The girl’s unease seemed evenly divided between my intrusion and the nearness of the bombs. How could he keep his erection through all this? I asked myself. I like tearing off a piece more than most, at least that was what my eighteen-year-old mind thought, but there was no way I could stand at attention during such a deadly hail. The Aussie had to have been a veteran of the siege of Torbruk.

While in school, I had read about the vicious, month-long beating Rommel gave the British in Libya. Hell, he didn’t even stop when a near miss shoveled mud through the tank’s hatch. No bomb was going to prevent him from getting his candy bar’s worth.

As soon as the raid was over, I gave them back their privacy and went looking for something on fire so I could enjoy one of my cigarettes. Unfortunately, the sight of the rubble of Herr Kies’s workshop ruined the taste of that tobacco. It was back to digging trenches under the sun.

♦ ♦ ♦

They assigned me to a
Kommando
working close to the cement kiln where Hubert had worked before his stint in the HKB. The kiln had a towering smokestack the likes of which I had never seen before, easily over 300 feet high. All winter most of the smokestack had been hidden by fog. Now it glistened and shone red. It was constructed of concrete castings and the seams of the individual blocks made it look like a patchwork quilt.

‘‘Do you see the second segment from the top?’’ a Polish yellow triangle asked as we were shoveling dirt out of a trench.

I nodded yes. The reek of kerosene told me that the Pole was spending his nights in the
Kra¨tzeblock
.

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SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

‘‘There’s a man’s body inside it. While we were pouring the cement, he slipped and fell into the mold. He pleaded for us to lower a nearby ladder, but the SS wouldn’t let us. Fresh cement was beginning to pile up. I’ll never forget his screams and terrified face as that mold filled.’’

A ribbon of blue carbide fumes weaved from the top of the monstrous smokestack and was swept away by the morning breeze.

The red and orange basket that hung from the smokestack was at its lowest position. When the basket was raised to the top of the smokestack, it signaled that Allied bombers had crossed into German territory. Because we were working in such close proximity, the squeaking of the basket’s pulleys was our initial warning. The first time I heard it, I thought it was a flock of birds gathering on the smokestack. The blast of the air raid sirens was our last warning, and by that time the bombers would be almost overhead.

A few
Ha¨ftlinge
had left to fetch our barrels of soup when I heard the birdcalls. The artificial fog began to blanket the trench, stinging our eyes and burning our lungs. We heard shrill sirens in the distance, then those in the factory began to wail. We watched civilian workers race to their air raid shelters or cling to fleeing trucks. None of us was in a rush. For a
Ha¨ftling,
an air raid was a game of roulette. Pick an open space away from the plant buildings or lie down in the hole you were digging and wait and see if the bombs fall on top of you. So I gathered a few dandelions as the fog thickened.

‘‘What are you doing, picking flowers for your funeral?’’ someone laughed.

‘‘No one else will.’’

The truth was that I was munching my bouquet in hopes the vitamins in the weeds would strengthen my bleeding gums. I plopped down with the others in the dirt between the kiln and some nearby warehouses.
Ha¨ftlinge
working in the factory buildings joined us. If it weren’t for those lying on their stomachs with their arms over their heads, and those who had placed discarded planks on top of themselves, it would have looked like we were waiting for PART II | AUSCHWITZ

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an afternoon concert in the park. Someone near me mumbled a drawn-out prayer in Yiddish. We lay there in the Nazi fog for a half-hour. Some of the men even dosed off. There weren’t many chances for a slave to enjoy a siesta.