The Street Sweeper (59 page)

‘Not necessarily. No man can get to them but what if there is a woman from within the resistance who could contact the women in the
Pulverraum
or even if there is another woman who works at the munitions factory who could?’

Inside the undressing room at Crematorium III the men had already started coming down. They were well advanced and most of the women were already at least partially undressed but for a mother and her two daughters, aged about twelve and fourteen. These three, all well dressed and clearly from a very comfortable background, did not move at all. Terrified, they looked around them in disbelief. Then the twelve-year-old said something to her mother in French and it happened that the
Sonderkommando
man nearest them, Chaim Neuhof, spoke a smattering of French.

Hurriedly in the middle of the chaos, trying to make sure the SS didn’t notice him talking to her, he asked, ‘Vous êtes française, madame? Madame? Are you French, madame?’

‘De la Belgique, monsieur,’ the fourteen-year-old replied shyly, her mother apparently totally unable to speak out of fear. The undressing room was filling up.

‘Madame, you must all of you undress immediately! If the SS see you dressed they will beat you. They will kill you and the girls with their clubs! All of you … undress now!’ he said in rapid whispered broken French while pretending to help an old man undress.

But a combination of shyness, shame, pride and terror rendered the mother and both of her daughters seemingly physically unable to comply. They just looked at the scene they were in with horrified disbelief but as though they were not a part of it.

‘Hurry, madame! Please!’ Chaim Neuhof insisted, still in a whisper with his head bowed as he helped the old man struggling to remove his trousers. An SS guard had now noticed the scene from the corner of his eye.

‘I will stand in front of you, madame. Please! For the young girls, you have to hurry! They will beat you!’

The
Sonderkommando
man, Chaim Neuhof, stood up and placed himself in front of the mother and her two daughters with his back turned to them but, because they were standing near the centre of a crowded room full of frantic movement, he could only partially cover them on one side and could guarantee nothing other than that he himself wouldn’t watch them undress. But somehow this act was itself enough to get them started. Neuhof provided seconds of cover from the SS man watching the mother and her daughters from the corner of his eye and by the time the guard’s view was no longer obscured, they were largely naked and the guard turned his attention elsewhere around the undressing room. Chaim Neuhof turned around and saw that finally they had complied. Fortuitously he’d been able to save them from a brutal beating in the last minutes of their lives. He usually worked the day shift, and had only swapped that shift with a man who was ill, a man who, like almost every other
Sonderkommando
member, spoke no French.

‘Thank you, madame,’ he said when he eventually turned around. The three of them moved a little towards him as though he was in a position to protect them, not realising that what little help he could ever offer had just in those few seconds been spent. The mother was about to touch him, an involuntary consequence of this mix of his kindness, her fear and her gratitude. For a moment, quite dangerously, he stopped in the middle of everything. This was when he saw them anew, each of them by now naked, each of the three of them to Neuhof so beautiful, their round eyes pleading with him, their unblemished pale skin, their thick shoulder-length auburn hair. Would he ever get this image out of his head? Different-sized versions of female perfection had appeared before him in the middle of hell, the very middle. Tears welled up in his eyes. He bent down and picked up their clothes. ‘Look at them!’ screamed a voice from inside his head. This was death talking. He had to turn away.

Gradowski continued his explanation to Henryk Mandelbrot. ‘A man was found who could make contact with a woman who could in turn make contact with the women in the
Pulverraum.’
He looked around to see if they were being watched. ‘Lewental has a brother, Noah, who is an electrician.’

‘Ah yes, Noah the electrician!’

‘Being an electrician, the younger Lewental has access to parts of the camp ordinary prisoners never get to.’

‘Yeah, but he still has to find the right woman. He can’t interview for the job.’

‘He has already found the perfect woman, so he says. She works in the
Effektenlager
, in
Kanada.’

‘That’s great; she’ll be in good shape.’

‘Yeah, and she’s from the Ciechanow group. That’s where the Lewentals are from. She was his girlfriend before the war. Zalman knows her as well. She’s going to be the contact between the women in the
Pulverraum
at the munitions factory and the
Sonderkommando
resistance. We’ll receive the gun powder, store it and, with the Russian, figure out how to convert it into weapons. Then when the signal comes from the Auschwitz Military Council, when they’re ready for the camp-wide rebellion, we’ll try to use everything we’ve got to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria. Who knows, maybe some of us will even escape from here.’

‘Do you think any of this is going to work?’

Gradowski turned to him. ‘Henryk, we’re all going to die anyway.’

‘Who in the
Sonderkommando
knows about this?’

‘Only those in the resistance know.’

‘Well, I assume if you’re telling me then –’

‘Yes, Henryk, I’m asking you to join. So will you join?’

‘Yes, of course. What’s there to think about? I don’t understand why you took so long to ask me.’

‘It’s just that … if we can … it will be the most dangerous enterprise undertaken in the entire history of this death camp.’

‘What here isn’t dangerous?’

‘That’s true, but you’ve never had any choice in anything that’s happened to you since you first came through the gates. This now would be your choice.’

‘Still, Zalman, can you seriously imagine me choosing not to be involved? And even if I did decline your invitation, there’s sure to be others here you could approach.’

‘Yes, but they’re not all trustworthy and, anyway, I really didn’t want to have to tell Lewental you’d declined.’

Now it was Henryk Mandelbrot’s turn to smile. ‘Since when were you so scared of Lewental?’

But Gradowski didn’t smile, in fact he turned away.

As they spoke quietly and still undetected, the last of the people from the transport were pushed naked inside the gas chamber attached to Crematorium III and an SS guard slammed the door shut. People began to cry at the sound the door made. A signal was given and within minutes the green pellets were being dropped in from above. A woman who had shown some considerable skill at the violin looked around in terror, realising she had become separated from the last person there whom she knew. She called out for her friend. It was drowned out by the screams of 2000 strangers. She was going to die alone and she knew it. A young mother from Belgium, quite unusually beautiful, hugged her daughters as tightly as she could with both arms. It had started.

‘No, I’m not scared of Lewental,’ said Zalman Gradowski, looking away from him in the direction of the burning pits.

‘So? I don’t get it,’ Mandelbrot asked.

‘Henryk, I didn’t really think you’d decline. But …’

‘So why’d you wait to ask me?’

‘What does it matter now?’

‘No, I want to know.’

Inside the gas chamber of Crematorium III the climbing had started.

‘If you had declined,’ said Gradowski, ‘given how much I’ve had to tell you … Well, I don’t know what Lewental might’ve done.’

The dogs had started barking again. Another transport had just arrived.

I
T WAS NIGHT
. The interminable
Appel
, the roll call, was over and the rations that masqueraded as the evening’s meals had been distributed when Rosa Rabinowicz, hoping she hadn’t been detected, reached the entrance of a block that was not hers within the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Looking around furtively, she spoke to the
Blockälteste
, the senior female prisoner responsible for a block within the barracks.

‘You have women here who work in the
Weichsel Union Metallwerke
factory?’

‘What if we do?’

‘Can you let me in?’

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m looking for a Jewish woman who works there in the
Pulverraum
, the one who lost her parents. I have a last message for her from them.’

‘What are you talking about? There’s not a Jewish woman
in
here that hasn’t lost her parents.’

The disingenuousness of Rosa’s approach had been as disarming as she had intended it to be.

Rosa Rabinowicz kept looking around. She was in danger just being there. ‘Can you let me in? Then I can explain.’

‘Why can’t you explain out here?’ Looking her up and down, the
Blockälteste
saw that Rosa seemed less starved than most of the other
prisoners. What had this Jew done to be better fed than the average prisoner? the woman wondered. Perhaps she shouldn’t be trusted? Or was she somebody with influence worth befriending? No ordinary Jew trying to find another Jew in Auschwitz-Birkenau would describe the person being sought as
the
one who had lost his or her parents. Who was she? Was she dangerous? What did she really want?

Rosa reached inside a pocket and pulled out a silver watch, which she showed the
Blockälteste
. ‘It’s yours if you let me in.’

‘Where did you get that?’ the woman said in astonishment.

‘You get the watch if you let me in. You don’t ever get any explanations.’

‘You’re from
Kanada
, aren’t you?’ the
Blockälteste
said, letting Rosa inside the block. In
Kanada
one could find food, or goods from the gassed victims’ belongings to trade for food.

Finding Noah Lewental had given Rosa the courage to make this approach. Not only was there someone left alive who had known her from before the start of this nightmare, but that someone was Noah. Her parents were almost certainly dead and in all likelihood Elise, her long-lost daughter, was also dead. Her siblings, if not already dead, would sooner or later be killed because that was the logic of the place. To be alive there was an aberration that would be corrected as soon as you had outlived your utility to the Third Reich. But Noah was still alive. He had found her in this vast factory of death and he had enlisted her in a plan to try to sabotage the killing machinery. Most people there could not bring themselves even to imagine fighting back. The SS were fully armed and equipped, well fed, strong and healthy. To try was to commit certain suicide and though most knew that death in this place was inevitable, few could bring themselves to hasten it. What if a husband, a child, a parent was still alive? Didn’t you want more than anything else to see them? Your good friend suicide, your best friend, would wait for you. Suicide was the one card always up your sleeve. It was just a matter of choosing the time to play it. But resisting the SS? Better to dream of fleeing to America. It was more realistic.

But now Rosa was not alone. Noah Lewental’s presence there had rekindled her sense of self and she was going to resist. It was with this
resolve that she had bribed her way into the block. Of course, as the
Blockälteste
had spat out with a mix of suspicion and contempt, Rosa knew that almost everybody there had lost their parents. But coupled with the silver watch from
Kanada
, of value as barter, the approach had got her into the block housing two girls employed, she’d been told, in the
Pulverraum
, the gunpowder area, of the
Weichsel Union Metallwerke
munitions factory, who might be prepared to help smuggle out quantities of gunpowder.

Rosa observed that a not uncommon evening ritual in many of the blocks of the women’s camp had already begun in this one too. At the back of the room, next to a woman picking the lice off another woman’s scalp, maybe half a dozen young Jewish women were sitting or lying listening to another woman whose turn it was to regale them with descriptions of food from home, dishes she remembered from before the war. Beside them a woman with glazed eyes and parched lips breathed through her mouth and shook with fever. Dysentery or typhus, who among them could tell? She could have been anyone and, live or die that evening, tomorrow it would be someone else. There was no one there who knew her full name, no one close enough to hear this woman wheezing who spoke her language. She’d been like this off and on for days. Nights were the worst and this was the worst of the nights. She’d never make it through another
Appel
. Falling out of and then back into consciousness long enough to hear a babble of languages she didn’t understand, long enough to see the lice being flicked from another woman’s scalp nearby, she was terrified. Surrounded by people who ignored her, she knew in her rare sentient moments that she was utterly alone and that this was how she would die. Who would be able to tell anyone after the war what had happened to this nameless woman?

‘She would use a kilogram of beef and cut the fat off. Then she would add one tablespoon of paprika, one tablespoon of crushed garlic –’

‘My mother added onions.’

‘I’m not up to the onions. You interrupted.
My
mother used onions …’

‘And the beans?’

‘Yes, red beans, of course.’

Rosa approached the two girls whom the
Blockälteste
had pointed out to her.

‘Are you Estusia?’ she asked.

‘Yes, who are you?’ the young woman answered.

‘Are you the Estusia who works in the
Pulverraum
at the
Union Metallwerke
factory?’

‘Yes. Who are you?’ she asked again, her sister, a girl of no more than fifteen, close beside her.

‘My name is Rosa Rabinowicz. Can I talk to you … alone?’

‘What’s this about?’

‘I’ll tell you if we can talk …’ She looked around the block. ‘Can we talk … alone?’