Scheisshaus Luck (26 page)

C H A P T E R 1 7

I found Hubert on the opposite side of the car, in the area where everyone was relieving himself. He was sitting in the filth and dampness.

‘‘Pierre, Pierre,’’ he cried. His trouser legs were soaked with blood from being stepped on, and his eyes were glassy and dull from his burning fever. I felt incredibly guilty. I had been gone for only a short while, but I should have anticipated this. I shouldn’t have left him. Hubert held out his hand to me. It was covered with black-ish goo. ‘‘Chocolate,’’ Hubert murmured.

The smell left no doubt what it really was. I took a ragged blanket, which wasn’t much cleaner than his hands, and wiped away his illusionary confection before he could eat it. I lifted him to his feet and jammed him against the wall.

‘‘You stole my chocolate,’’ Hubert whimpered.

‘‘I’m sorry.’’

There were tie-downs on the walls. I grabbed an ownerless blanket, pushed it through one of the rings, weaved it under Hubert’s armpits, and made a knot over his chest. With his blanket wrapped around his head and shoulders, he dozed off right away. I sat down. My legs were swollen and soft, and yellowish flesh was 179

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bulging over the tops of my wooden shoes. In another day, perhaps two, I wouldn’t be able to stand.

Hubert awoke delirious, calling out my name over and over again. Nothing I did or said could quiet him. As the train raced down a hill, I shared a blanket with Antoine, a red triangle Frenchman who had been in one of my
Kommandos
.

‘‘Why don’t you throw him overboard and end his suffering?’’

I shook my head. ‘‘I couldn’t live with myself.’’

Again I tried to quiet Hubert. I didn’t want his whining to get on anyone’s nerves, especially those
Kapos
. How had my hallucinat-ing friend only a few days before managed to drag me to Gleiwitz?

Was his effort to keep me alive the reason he was sick now? Probably. I must not allow anyone else to die so I could see tomorrow. I could not be propped up by Hubert’s bones.

Somehow I fell asleep against Antoine’s shoulder. He nudged me awake. It was dark and Hubert was still calling for me.

‘‘It’s okay,’’ I told Antoine, ‘‘he’ll quiet down.’’

‘‘No, it’s not your friend. Look over there.’’ He pointed at a couple
Ha¨ftlinge
bent over a corpse. ‘‘We better stay awake.’’

I didn’t know what Antoine was talking about or what I was supposed to be looking at until I saw one of the
Ha¨ftlinge
lift out the corpse’s liver. The pair slinked off to an empty corner and killed their hunger. No one moved, no one reacted, no one seemed to care. So this is what we have been reduced to. They finally suc-ceeded in turning us into subhumans.

Once more they made us unload the dead bodies. I asked Antoine to watch over Hubert, then I climbed out of the car, hoping to find something edible while knowing that at least I would return with a cap full of clean snow. The second morgue car was nearly full. It struck me that Hubert would fare better with the dead than with the living. At least we could lie down. I hobbled back to the car as fast as I could. Incoherent, Hubert couldn’t understand and Antoine seemed more repulsed by my plan than by those hyenas eating the liver. I freed Hubert from his sling, placed him on the PART III | THE DEATH MARCH

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blanket, and dragged him to the end of the train. I was lucky that he was keeping quiet. We couldn’t afford to draw any attention.

‘‘Don’t worry, my friend. This is going to be much more comfortable.’’

It took every once of strength I had to push him up into the car.

Even with the corpses packed tightly, it was hard to get my footing and I fell a few times pulling Hubert to the center of the pile. I dropped breathless next to him, trying to ignore the hundreds of unblinking eyes staring at me. No one was yelling in German to get those two living corpses out of there, so I knew my scheme had worked. But my gush of pride was tempered by a new fear—if they uncoupled the two cars from the rest of the train, we would be as good as dead. Suddenly our car rocked forward and back. The train was coming alive. I patted Hubert’s still hand.

‘‘
Cela va marcher, vieille noix
.’’ (It will work out, old nut.) Once the train was out of the station, I gathered together as many jackets and trousers as I could and made a bed out of them. I hadn’t had such comfortable sleeping quarters since I was shipped out of France.

The din of the train passing over a bridge snapped me awake. I broke out in a cold sweat, thinking we were being bombed. The burned-out carcasses of trains that I had seen lying on the side of the tracks were haunting me. The wind whistled and howled over me as I stood up and looked around. The train was rushing down-hill at full throttle. The dead men’s garments flapped and waved, and their bluish flesh shone in the moonlight. All we needed, I thought, were a few spider webs and ‘‘the god with the moustache’’

at the throttle to make this phantom train complete.

The next day we passed through some of the finest scenery in Europe as the train lugged along the foot of the Bohemian Mountains. Unfortunately, from where I sat I couldn’t savor their beauty.

I was too tortured by my hunger and thirst. I thought of the two
Ha¨ftlinge
who had eaten the dead man’s liver. I was sure the same scenario was playing out in every car. No, it was better to die than to come to that. I pondered why it was the cannibals, the ones with 182

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no restraint, no scruples, who seemed to survive and prosper? I had no answer and figured I never would.

The train began to slow. I looked out. The area ahead had been thoroughly bombed. Along the embankment were the smoldering remains of a freight train. Our train stopped, and the morgue came to rest below a bridge. A Czech railway worker looked down in horror. What an unimaginable sight a freight car full of corpses must have been to the uninitiated. I waved to him. From the look on his face he must have thought that I had risen from the dead.

He opened his shoulder bag and tossed down a little package to me.

I was about to pick it up when a shot rang out. The man sagged onto the railing, where he hung for a moment, then tumbled down into our car. Now I was the one staring in horror. Hubert awoke, calling out my name. Fearing that the SS would swarm into the car at any second, I threw myself on top of him.

‘‘
Tais toi et ne bouges pas! Daida Lou Bodu
!’’ (Keep shut and stay still! The goon is coming!), I hissed in Hubert’s ear as I put my hand over his mouth.
Daida Lou Bodu
is Nice slang that we used to warn classmates when the teacher was coming. I flattened myself on top of Hubert and took only short breaths. If the guards came they would be right on top of us because the dead civilian was only an arm’s length away.

Finally the train started moving. I rolled off Hubert and looked at the railway worker’s prostrate body. I turned him over. A stream of blood was running from where his right eye had been. Why had they killed him? Were they afraid of partisans? Had they taken the package he tossed for a bomb? Or had this civilian become an embarrassing witness, unwittingly spying the Nazi underbelly? I opened the package he had dropped—a piece of bread and a sausage. Inside his shoulder bag I found the rest of his lunch. Hubert and I devoured the food so quickly that we almost choked. Suddenly I was no longer afraid of dying from starvation before arriving at the next ‘‘Pitchi Poi
.
’’

The railway man’s wedding band made me think of his wife. I pictured her anxiously standing on the stoop, waiting for him. She PART III | THE DEATH MARCH

183

would never know how or why he had suddenly disappeared, or that the lunch she made her husband gave two emaciated teens another chance at survival. The man looked about the same age as my father. He probably had sons and daughters. Had it been his pater-nal instincts that compelled him to be a Good Samaritan? There would be tears, curses, and questions by family members for months, and I was the only one who could tell them that the ‘‘god with a moustache’’ and his goons had propped me and Hubert up with their loved one’s bones.

Hubert fell fast asleep and awoke in the late afternoon a different person. Those few calories had done wonders.

‘‘Do you think that some day you will run your family’s business?’’ I asked in an attempt to gauge his mental state.

‘‘Well, if you should ever find and marry that girl Stella, you’ll have a roomful of our finest carnations,’’ he smiled.

It amazed me that he remembered her name because I hadn’t mentioned Stella for some time. I became sad. I hadn’t given Stella much thought. Truthfully, close to none. If she was even alive when we left Auschwitz, I couldn’t imagine her surviving the march. And if she was alive on some other train, I hoped that she had more confidence in my tenacity than I did in hers.

I awoke to find the train stopped on a sidetrack. I looked over to Hubert, who was peacefully gazing at the sky.

‘‘How long have we been here?’’ I whispered.

‘‘An hour or more.’’

‘‘Why? Have they unloaded the cars?’’

‘‘I don’t think so. I’ve only heard
boche
voices.’’

I carefully inched over to the edge. From the snatches of conversations I caught, it seemed that no one had been moved yet.

There was a question if the nearby camp, Mauthausen, could absorb us. I truly hoped they couldn’t. In Auschwitz, I had heard that Mauthausen was one large quarry, and breaking rocks for twelve-hour stretches in the winter was not appetizing, whatsoever. I crawled back to Hubert and told him what I had heard. He complained that 184

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if he had to lie still much longer, he would be frostbitten. I reminded him that he would be much colder with a bullet in his brain.

Three or four hours later, with the sun setting, I heard an SS

guard say to another that there wasn’t enough room to take the whole load. I guess breaking rocks wasn’t killing
Muselma¨nner
fast enough. Shortly thereafter the train started moving again.

♦ ♦ ♦

‘‘
Alles raus! Alles raus
!’’ the SS ordered. I peeked over the rim. We were stopped at the foot of a steep hill, and the guards were beginning to line what
Ha¨ftlinge
were left next to a trail leading up to barbed-wire and pine tree shrouded barracks. This I presumed was our new ‘‘Pitchi Poi.’’ The guards had their backs turned to the morgue cars so it was easy for Hubert and me to slip out and fall in with the others. We all threw ourselves on the ground and greedily ate the snow. Glancing back at the train, I saw that every car had practically become a morgue. It looked as if we had lost about 80

percent of our fellow ‘‘pajamas.’’

We stumbled along the train track, which disappeared into a tunnel at the foot of the hill. The tunnel’s entrance was camouflaged with a canopy of netting woven with greenery and guarded by a fortified pillbox. Next to the tunnel was a pile of gigantic cylin-drical aluminum sheets that looked like cigars sliced in half. They had been meticulously camouflaged. I couldn’t imagine what they could be used for, but my mind wasn’t altogether clear. I could barely hold up my head.

The guards ordered us onto a trail that veered away from the tunnel’s entrance, then zigzagged up to the camp. It took everything I had to keep Hubert on his feet as we went up those switchbacks.

This camp seemed newer, smaller, and better constructed than Monowitz. At least from the outside, it appeared that the
Blocks
were built for human beings, not animals. I wondered if the Germans had planned this to be a vacation resort after their victory.

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We were immediately ushered to the showers. Once again, all our clothing was taken from us. Bye, bye, wool sweaters. Again, a shower that went from freezing to scalding. From the bitching of the
Ha¨ftlinge
from Majdanek and Gleiwitz, I realized that every single camp had the same design: to kill
Untermenschen
by inches.

When we came out of the showers they lined us up for a ‘‘selection.’’ I held my breath as Hubert threw out his chest and sum-moned his last reserves of strength, but they shoved him among the
Muselma¨nner
, or rather, the super-
Muselma¨nner
. There were tears in my eyes as I watched him totter away. My puny chest was filled with whimpers of protest, and somewhere in my numb brain I felt the urge to go after him. But I knew that opening my mouth or running after Hubert would just get me killed, too. So, I stood silent like a good
Untermensch
.

I had helped Hubert to the limit of my endurance, when I could barely stand myself, and it hadn’t been enough. The
boches
had pressed the last drop of blood and sweat from my friend, and now they were going to fertilize some cabbage field with his ashes. For the first time I grasped the hell of watching family, loved ones, trudge toward Birkenau’s belching chimneys. As we were being led into this new camp, I had seen a brick chimney. I knew the SS had shut down the Auschwitz crematoriums in November. Were they still burning here? I couldn’t assume they weren’t. That was hope, and the longer I treaded in striped ‘‘pajamas,’’ the more I believed hope was a cancer.

Dressed now in light summer ‘‘pajamas’’ and felt slippers, we were herded through the snow to a large frame building. The sign at the door read Kino
,
the German word for ‘‘cinema.’’ We sat down on rows of wooden benches. To keep myself from dwelling on Hubert, I studied the faces of the men around me. Oh, we were a sorry lot. Even the green triangles who had left Auschwitz in much better shape than the rest of us were now faint shadows. We had survived, but it was a hollow victory. We were still breathing as slaves behind the barbed wire that encircled a camp called Dora, 186

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and me without my
vieille noix
(‘‘Old Nut’’) to share my suffering with.