The Fighter (11 page)

“Next week, we'll be dressed in white.”

“From then on, three months.”

“How do they put away the Sonderkommando? Do you think they gas them?”

“I'd prefer a gunshot.”

“You can always run toward the fence if you want a bullet in the head.”

“We can still escape. Or at least, we can try to find a way.”

“Me, I'd rather stay. We're doomed anyway. In the Sonderkommando, I can drink and eat. I'll sleep in a bed, I'll wash, I won't get beaten anymore.”

In our group of seven men, two say they prefer to stay. If we want to turn back into ordinary prisoners, we have to hurry. We still sleep in our usual block, but we know that any day now, they'll send us to the Sonderkommando's separate camp.
ⁱ

Now that I am in line for the Sonderkommando, Laybich treats me with the kind of respect that men condemned to death get in jail before their execution. He gives me back my straw mattress. I can even sleep all alone. I don't sleep well, though. I dream that my mother, Rachel, and my little Élie enter the small house. They're glad they'll be able to wash. Me, too, I want to enter the house and tell them to come out, but the door is locked already.

The last time, Laybich called me Wisniak. Now he wants to know my first name.

“Maurice.”

“Maurice? Are you kidding? You mean Moshe!”

“Yes, Moshe.”

“Listen, Moshe. When you're over there… If, some day, you never know… If they take me there to gas me… Find a heavy club and break my head with one blow. You're strong, I know you can do it.”

He wants me to shorten his suffering. To act like the mothers who murder their own children. Do I love him like I love my own son? I hate him. He had already taken my number down to choke me in my sleep and line up my body with four others outside the block. I want the bastard to suffer. Or do I? I don't know. Revenge? Laybich is but a cog in the terrible machinery of the camp. He never decided to become a murderer. If the Germans hadn't started this war and created the abomination of Auschwitz, he would be a tailor or a salesman somewhere in Poland. These Nazis are the real murderers. Could I club someone to death, actually? A friend, to keep him from suffering? An enemy? A German? I've never killed anybody. I'm not as brave as the mothers. I can still hear the sound of the men in white breaking apart their stiffened fingers.…

Laybich acts like I already belong to the Sonderkommando. I don't and I won't. I want to survive and tell the world about Auschwitz. At least I'll try. This is what makes me different from Laybich. “We'll all die,” he says, “but I'll die last.” He kills the dying to postpone his own death. He kills out of despair, in a way. Me, I hope to get out. I refuse to become a murderer, since I intend to go back to Paris and live an honorable life.

Besides, these desperate killers don't always survive longer than we do. They fight to the death with knives in the barons' toilets, under the cold glare of the Russian war prisoners. It is said that Marek, our former block senior, was killed by an SS he had been peddling gold teeth to.
That an SS should kill his golden goose shows how crazy they are.

I need to be especially alert and wary. Today is our seventh day in the kommando. Something must turn up before tomorrow or I'm dead. I get up. I stand in the snow during the morning call. I drink the coffee. Nothing turns up. I go back to the kommando with my six comrades. We spend the morning in silence inside the shed. We hear muffled shots coming from the houses. Soon, dressed in white, we'll have to reassure the poor naked Jews so that they cross the deadly threshold without faltering.

We move the floodlights, then go back to the shed to eat. Just after lunch, our SS brings us back to the camp—as if he offered us an afternoon off to mark the end of our probation week.

I've been resting in my block for twenty minutes or so when the camp's loudspeakers bark an announcement: “Volunteers are required for a coal mine kommando. Anybody can apply, except for the seven electricians.”

Without thinking at all, I run out of the block. Something has turned up!

As I'm approaching the kommandos' meeting point, I begin to think. What if our SS is there to check whether any of his electricians is trying to escape? Too bad. Even if my chances of success are low, it's better to try my luck than to do nothing and end up in white, which means certain death.

An SS doctor examines us, following the usual Auschwitz
procedure: we undress and show him our backsides, since Muselmen can be recognized instantly by their fleshless buttocks. He also asks us to jump over a two-foot-wide trench. What with my boxer's legs and a week of rest in the shed, I find it easy enough. Many comrades fail this test. In the end, the doctor keeps four hundred fit men.

I see a smiling face. Good old Brod! He seized his chance, too.

“Fancy meeting you here, Brod. You didn't fall in the ditch, with that fat belly of yours?”

“My legs were shaking. I wondered whether our SS was going to look for his electricians.”

“We shouldn't get our hopes up. You never know what to expect here. Maybe they are recruiting men for the Sonderkommando. Nobody ever volunteers, so they invent coal mines as a ploy.”

“So tomorrow, either we're dressed in white or we're coal black at the bottom of the mine! Or our SS catches us. In that case, he puts a bullet into our skulls. Then we're neither black nor white.”

“He won't come. I know him. He didn't understand why the Sonderkommando scared us. He let us look at the gas chamber to help us conquer our fear. ‘See, my friends, nothing frightening about it. The Jews walk calmly into the little house. They pray to their God and die; then you bury them. It is quite simple.' He's sure he cured us of our silly fear.”

“He thinks we're eager to join the Sonderkommando?”

“Of course! Three months of comfortable living! He would prefer that to a day-by-day struggle for life with constant beatings. He can't imagine we'd choose the mine instead.”

“Tomorrow, he'll be missing two electricians out of seven.”

“He won't bat an eye. He'll think our block senior killed us for any old reason—or without any reason.”

We walk out of the camp with the usual escort of kapos and SS. We're relieved to see that we go toward Auschwitz I rather than toward the gas chambers. We've made it!

I've spent five months or so in Birkenau, but I feel I've always lived there. My former world has been reduced to a vague memory that sometimes haunts my nights.

The distance between Auschwitz I and II is under two miles, but we need more than an hour to shuffle across. The icy December night is already falling when we reach Auschwitz I. We have to undress again to be shaved and deloused. Suddenly, after only three-quarters of our kommando have entered the delousing room, sirens begin to shriek: Air alert! Locking all blocks!

You can't always be lucky. I stay outside, naked in the cold air, with about a hundred comrades. We run every which way, looking for a block that might have kept its door open. Russian airplanes fly over the camp. Our chalky bodies glimmer like immense glowworms in the bright light of the Russian flares.

Driven by our survival instinct, we flock together to escape the cold. Every one of us tries to dive as deep as he can into the warm pulsating swarm. Being stronger than
the others, I reach the center quickly. Just as quickly, without being able to react or realize what's happening, I am thrown back outside. Giant worms are entering the swarm in a constant flow, pushing and shoving, popping out, running around. I try shadowboxing to get warm, but I am not strong enough to vanquish the Polish blizzard. My blood is cooling. Soon I'll be stiff and blue, like the corpses I used to see on the bridge when I crossed the Vistula. I throw myself onto my comrades and rub my skin against theirs. I enter the swarm again, but I can't stop shivering.

After an infinite length of time (one hour? much more? much less?), the alert is over. The doors open. They shave our bodies and tear off our skin in the usual manner. On our first day in the camp, they sheared a strip of hair on our heads. Now they shave the rest. They immerse us into a vat of gasoline to kill the lice. The kapo advises us to close our eyes, but my eyes still burn when I come out. This is nothing compared to the maddening pain that gnaws the places where the shears tore my skin away, especially between the legs. Then we are entitled to a real shower. I mean, a real Auschwitz shower, with neither soap nor towel—a divine shower, the first for me since the clothing kommando. I say good-bye to the king-sized jacket I had received in that wonderful clothing kommando, which was turning slowly into rags. They give us shirts and uniforms that look like striped pajamas. I'm glad they allow me to keep my good winter boots.

In this part of the world, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, the winter temperature falls below zero. I wonder whether the pajamas can keep us warm. Right now, I'm burning and shivering, my head is spinning, I find it hard to breathe. I guess I caught a cold during the alert.

They let us sleep on the floor in the delousing block. I collapse and sink into a deep sleep. In the morning, I feel someone shaking me. I see a fuzzy face, as if through a thick fog.

“Is that you, Brod? Where are we? What happened?”

“Wake up, Wisniak. This is no time to be sick. Get up, quick. A doctor is going to inspect us again.”

He helps me stand up. I've got to walk on my own two feet in front of the doctor. I'm lucky. This is not an SS doctor like yesterday, but a prisoner in a doctor's smock, supervised by a plain SS. He can see that I'm tottering and shivering.

“Do you want to go to the hospital or to the mine?”

I try to answer, “To the mine,” but I hear that my voice has a mind of its own.

“I'm sick. Leave me alone.”

I've lost control. My fever has taken over. The doctor seems angry.

“What kind of a joke is this? You're healthy enough to work.”

The SS offers his own diagnosis:

“He's sick. Send him to the
KB.
”
^j

Suddenly, the doctor punches me in the chest. He doesn't hit very hard, but my legs are so wobbly that I fall to the ground. Instantly, I rebound like a spring. This is a camp rule: when you're hit, you get right up and stand at attention until the next one comes. If you stay down, you'll be kicked or clubbed to death. I don't stand up in obeyance of the law, but because I have acquired this reflex long ago, like all the prisoners who survived the fateful first three weeks.

The doctor turns toward the SS.

“See, he's very strong. He'll make a good miner.”

My mind is all mixed up. I don't understand what's happening to me. I complain to Brod: “Did you see that swine? Hits a sick man! Calls himself a doctor….”

“Don't you understand? He just saved your life! He saw your number. He knew you would get up.”

We line up in rows of five and walk to Jawischowitz,
^k
where there is a camp near the mine. The doctor was right: if I were really sick, I wouldn't be able to walk.

The SS guards who oversee us want to have some fun.

“You make too much dust when you drag your shoes, you shitbags. Take them off!”

We bruise and scrape our feet on the stones of the un-paved road. In spite of the pain, I keep on walking. The SS
order us to walk faster. I walk faster. They order us to sing. I sing and I walk. They dole out blows to teach us how to sing in tune. I shake with fever, I endure the blows, I sing and I walk. I begin to weep like a child. Brod worries.

“Feeling worse, Wisniak? I've never seen you cry. Your feet hurt?”

“Until the age of six, I went barefoot. The soles of my feet aren't as calloused as they used to be, but I can take it. No, I'm crying out of joy, because we escaped the Sonderkommando.”

After half a day's walk, we reach Jawischowitz. This camp is much smaller than Birkenau. There are other differences. They welcome us in a civilized manner by giving us “coffee.” What's more, they serve it in regular bowls, not in chamber pots. As we're even more thirsty than usual, because of the road's dust, we rush toward the barrels. The Jawischowitz kapos slow us down with their clubs, but they don't kill anybody. We can enjoy a warm shower with soap. We sleep on straw mats. One man per mat. Paradise!

We don't go down to the mine right away, because they quarantine us. They want to check that none of us have a contagious disease. It would be bad for production if we spread diseases to the real Polish miners. Here, they do not produce corpses like in Auschwitz, but coal for the Reich.

During our quarantine, we dig trenches in the mud. It rains, it snows. We get a marvelous hot shower every
evening, but afterward I have to put my wet clothes on again. They never seem to dry. It would be better if I was sandwiched between two comrades at night, like before. I am always cold. I don't eat enough to regain my strength. My fever returns, bringing along a nasty cough and my familiar companion, diarrhea. When I fall asleep, I see the gas chamber in my nightmares—the entangled corpses, the strangled children, the earth oozing blood. My will to live frays gently but steadily. I would like to die without suffering. I talk to Brod.

“Did you notice there is no patrol in front of the fence?”

“So what? Do you want to escape?”

“This is not like Auschwitz. You can throw yourself onto the wire without being bothered. You die at once.”

“What are you talking about? We decided we would survive, don't you remember? We're going to tell the world what we've seen.”