Sunrise West (5 page)

As we entered the gates of Wolfsburg, I realized with shame that the camp's taskmasters were drawn from among my own. They at once gave us to understand that this would be no Jerusalem, that we had re-entered Egypt, that we were to slave under their strict supervision. Then, after a thorough physical (that is, a severe roughing-up), we were told the happy news: ‘Lucky bastards, you're now the property of Heinrich Butzer, the most prestigious road-building company in the whole Reich!' Our job was to fill in the valley between the mountains of Pithom and Raamses.

‘And you should understand,' added one of the leading taskmasters, ‘that the traditional welcome you just received is only to make you aware that this is not the holiday resort you came from, but a
working
camp. Rest assured that we know how to deal with malingerers.'

We were warned that since the beginning of time, daylight in these parts had suffered from an abrupt death. As the clouds of evening descended on our camp like a sudden flock of dishevelled witches, I asked Raymond: ‘Why the cruelty? Why are these muggers our own?' Of course I remembered well the brutality of the Jewish police in the ghetto, and of the
kapos
at Auschwitz-Birkenau. ‘Did our friendly reception in Jerusalem cloud my mind with delusions?'

‘Well,' he replied, ‘have you forgotten the mass of riff-raff and delinquents that embarked with us on our first Exodus?'

‘But Raymond, that was three thousand years ago!'

‘They say that weeds outlive the grass.'

We were assigned to a gang charged with pushing out the stones and rubble from the side-tipping wagonettes that came rumbling out of the tunnels carved into the mountains. It seemed to us that the idea of escaping underground had become our masters' obsession. ‘Beelzebub began in the dark, and will finally end there,' Raymond prophesied.

During the first week of November it snowed at daybreak. Our world dropped into a frozen silence. As the hollow rhythmic thud of our wooden clogs came to a blunt halt, our foreman's rasping nasal voice rang out: ‘Gang 17 — you've been promoted to tunnelling duty!'

And so we were driven into the domain of rock and black dust.

Although both slaves and masters knew that the war was coming to an end, life in the camp went on as before. Our guards' conviction that their work was of paramount importance made them impervious not only to our sufferings but even to the slaughter of their own brethren. (Every day we saw trucks rumble past carrying wounded German soldiers from the front.) The guards considered themselves a special breed, entitled to sleep in warm, secure quarters and to eat handsomely.

As the year slid towards Christmas, a huge pine-tree was erected in the guards' mess-hall; and while the trucks of wounded soldiers from the front streamed past our campworld, these well-protected heroes of Wolfsburg zealously downed schnapps after schnapps until their ‘Silent Night' had evaporated into a foggy nightmare.

A week later, at evening roll-call, as the temperature fell to 15 below zero while the white unchanging mountains maintained their brooding indifference, our
Lagerführer
— whom we had dubbed ‘Cyclops' for the black patch over his left eye, and for his craftiness at setting prisoner against prisoner — stood up to make an announcement. Accompanied by his swaggering young deputy Henk, he surveyed us with a reptile smile twisting his thin lips, and declared: ‘Men, I have been ordered to announce that tomorrow morning you are to embark on a new and life-saving journey.'

And so, harbouring a deep apprehension in our cold and empty stomachs, we prepared to rejoin the roads,
paved with frozen fire and death, an Exodus that would lead into the very heart of Sodom and Gomorrah.

 

 
Pepper
 

A few days before our departure from Wolfsburg, there had been an incident involving our
Meister
— our overseer on work sorties — who because of his diminutive size was nick-named ‘Pepper'. He had a nondescript face, with blue eyes like dull watery puddles, and he walked with a mountaineer's stick in his fist and a foolish smile on his lips. According to his own story, before the war Pepper had owned a shoe shop in Hamburg, yet he had also been a member of the Communist Party. When the political wind changed he bent with it, joining the Todt construction and engineering organization in the service of the new state.

Camp inmates felt reasonably safe under Pepper's supervision. He seldom resorted to brutal force, and sometimes, unnoticed by his colleagues, would leave a slice of bread where a starving prisoner might find it. But from the moment he was appointed to oversee our work commando, Pepper took a peculiar interest in Raymond. On one occasion he motioned my friend aside and harangued him on Germany's unconquerable superiority and the Führer's genius. Raymond stood to attention while the tiny Pepper imparted this philosophy, and then responded cautiously with vaguely approving words wrapped in riddles. Pepper listened with a great deal of suspicion before dismissing his student with a kick in the pants.

Winter, January 1945. Pepper's superior unconquerable Germany was holding on by a thread; but the frost, conscripted by our enemy, still maintained a hardy nelson on our lives. Our commando was in a nearby village digging channels for the laying of sewerage pipes. The digging was difficult, the earth was ungiving — we worked ankle-deep in frozen mud and slush, and our frostbitten hands kept losing their grip on the pickaxes. It was forbidden for Jewish prisoners to wear gloves. Needless to say, the task was beyond our strength.

Suddenly, out of the blue, Pepper swooped upon the scene. He was like a drunkard in a rage. Without any preliminaries he shouted that there would be no bread for the next two days. He let his mountaineer's stick fly — left, right, left, right. Then he reached up and grabbed Raymond by the throat, screaming: ‘Rapists! Degenerates! I'll teach you all some decency! I'll teach you!'

In our barrack that night, still stunned, we tried to find some reason for Pepper's uncharacteristic outburst of madness. Naturally all eyes were on Raymond, but he sat on his bunk like a stone dummy. It took us a few days to learn the truth of why our
Meister
had snapped. Pepper's breakdown had been caused by news of the Soviet invasion of East Prussia, the slaughter and devastation there, and the rape of defenceless women and girls of all ages.

‘There were no Russians at hand,' Raymond said afterwards, ‘but
we
were. Stupidity is not necessarily evil. Evil is necessarily stupid.'

 

 
Pyrrhic Victors
 

The waking gong sounded at midnight. It was pitch-dark, even the searchlights were off, and the thunder of heavy artillery in the dead of night heralded the coming of our liberators. ‘That's why the sudden departure,' said Raymond. ‘Obviously they've been forced to liquidate the camp. The Valhalla warriors are finally trapped, though they once believed there was nothing on earth through which the German sword could not cleave a way. What amazes me most,' he added, ‘is that they can't do without us.'

It was on a dark, wintry dawn that five hundred emaciated, starving, tongueless men took to the road that had run out of roads.

Perhaps to combat the numbness, the nagging hunger and the misery, I pondered the scene I had witnessed the previous evening. Our
Stubendienst
had watched, for the third time in his two years of captivity, as the flames in the barrack's little iron stove mercilessly devoured the remnants of his bunk; and while they danced a fiery nocturnal jig on his despondent face, he sang an old folktale which, at least for a few moments, cradled to sleep the dread we were all facing:

Why do you look so sullen?

Why is your face so long?

Let me tell of your noble roots,

Sing you a homely song.

Your father was a wagon-greaser,

Your mother stole fish at first light,

Your brother was a famous pickpocket,

And your sister walks the street at night.

After marching from daybreak to sunset for two days on empty stomachs, except for the snow we licked from each other's sleeves, we stopped for the night at a small barn on the outskirts of a village. Here some of our weary men, able to abide such torment no longer, quietly lay down, to smile up at their frightened God who gazed down numbly as His chosen children ceased to be. Yet there were others who grew delirious, wild. Needless to say, the guards marching with us knew how to deal with such rebels; and to make sure they were really dead they put a bullet through the head of each corpse.

Suddenly a revelation! A true miracle, an angel from heaven — in the form of a cauldron of hot soup! Like a surging river, hundreds of men rushed forward. Cyclops, our
Lagerführer
from Wolfsburg, stood calmly beside this unexpected treasure, his rifle trained on the sea of famished prisoners. We knew that this trigger-happy vandal, who was content to shoot anyone unable to keep up with the pace he set, was capable of letting a volley loose on us without blinking an eye, but the aroma rising from the belly of the steaming magic cauldron was too much for us to maintain decorum.

The self-assured
Lagerführer
— begetter of malevolent scenarios among the prisoners, provoker of suspicions and animosities designed to set us against each other — turned
away nonchalantly as if to walk towards his quarters. Then, abruptly, he leapt back and with a single kick capsized the cauldron, tipping our coveted meal into the dirty snow. He stood there waiting to see our reaction, but to his disappointment none of us moved: everyone remained frozen to the spot. At the time I didn't really know why this was so — was it his gun we feared? Only much later did I come to understand that somehow, from deep within ourselves, we had unanimously chosen to refuse to validate his delusions — the conviction that his
Herrenvolk
, his Master Race, had succeeded in completely dehumanizing the children of the Hebrew Bible.

Our Cyclops lost his cool. ‘
Judenschwein!
' he screeched. ‘That's your dinner!
Fress
, or I'll kill you all!'