The Street Sweeper (62 page)

John Hope Franklin had also been a colleague of William McCray and even then, in his early nineties, he was still in touch with him. Adam wondered how disappointed William would be if he failed to come up with anything new concerning black troops at the liberation of Dachau. When last they’d met, William had been disconsolate over the trial of six African American teenagers in Jena, Louisiana. Adam had wanted to distract him from the trial with reports of his progress concerning the role of black troops in the liberation of concentration camps but he had had very little to tell him. He did tell William about Henry Border, however, and William was very much taken with the story of the Chicago psychologist.

‘Are you telling Charlie all about this?’ William asked. Adam didn’t seem to think there was much point.

‘Nonsense! You’ve got to tell him. I will if you don’t.’

He lay in bed and looked at the clock radio. Now it was 3.47 am. The tap in the bathroom hadn’t stopped dripping. It was this that had first woken him and it was this that he eventually got up to turn off. Once up, Adam, still half asleep, opened the bathroom cabinet and took out the comb Diana had left there. He held it in his hand and looked at the strands of her hair against his palm. This was becoming a ritual.

‘Are you lonely?’ he said inaudibly. ‘What do you eat? Do you cook or do you live on take-out because cooking for one is … pointless, isn’t it? How can you be bothered cooking for one? All those leftovers, they can make you sick if you’re not careful. And then there are the shopping lists, tiny scribbled lists on scraps of paper, urban survival lists,
they
can make you sick just looking at them. I’m so sorry. Do you know that? Do you ever think about what I’m thinking? I was never unfaithful to you. That doesn’t count for anything now, does it? I should have been unfaithful and then confessed it. The end result might have been the same but it would have at least been understandable. Do you ever think about me? Or have you already let go? Sometimes I picture two clasped hands slowly loosening their grip. Slowly, slowly, where once they held on to each other they merely touch each other. Then through the agency of inertia, or something, or gravity, the gravitational attraction of neighbouring bodies, so to speak, they begin to drift apart. One barely moves at all while the other drifts away.’

Diana didn’t say anything.

‘I’ve taken out a personal loan. I went to the bank and got a loan to fund a return trip to Melbourne to speak to a woman there, one of Border’s women, one of the Holocaust survivors he interviewed in the summer of ‘46. It might be a complete waste of time and money. I didn’t tell the bank that I already know that my employment is limited. Is this the kind of confidence you want me to have? I think I have it now … in my work. It’s to do with the black troops at Dachau I’m following up and with other things that Border has led me to. I’ve got something now, quite a lot. It’s almost too much. If only I’d found this sooner. It goes around and around in my head. How do you sleep? Do you wake up knowing I’m sorry? Or have you let go?’

From his office the next morning Adam called Diana’s mobile phone. It was turned off. Perhaps she was already teaching. He left a message. He wanted to meet up with her. Dinner, a drink, whatever she wanted.

‘Choose a place, somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen is fine with me. I really want to talk to you.’

*

The
Sonderkommando
resistance members had not held out much hope of Henryk Mandelbrot and Chaim Neuhof succeeding in their attempt to persuade the joint Auschwitz Military Council to agree to bring forward its plan for a camp-wide uprising. The murder of 200
Sonderkommando
men in September had done nothing to change the thinking of the non-Jewish resistance. In early October the situation grew even more urgent when the
Sonderkommando Kapos
, the SS-appointed prisoners in charge, were commanded to furnish the SS within twenty-four hours with a list of 300
Sonderkommando
men.
Scharführer
Busch, an SS Lance Sergeant, announced that the chosen 300 were to be taken out from Auschwitz-Birkenau to clear rubble and debris from a nearby town that had been badly damaged in an Allied air raid. Not one member of the
Sonderkommando
believed this.

Scharführer
Busch had in effect given the
Kapos
twenty-four hours to make a list of 300 of their colleagues to be murdered and left the
Kapos
to their own devices to sort it out. Each man wondered to himself, ‘Have I ever done anything to offend one of the
Kapos?’

The men of the
Sonderkommando
stayed up all night. They argued with each other. They pleaded with the
Kapos
and with anyone they thought capable of influencing the
Kapos
such as the two Zalmans, Lewental and Gradowski, two of the longest serving members of the
Sonderkommando
. The two were impressed by the criterion that Henryk Mandelbrot suggested should be used in drawing up the list. The
Kapo
they had known best, Kaminski, had recently been shot on suspicion of sabotage but they went to another
Kapo
, one who was part of the
Sonderkommando
resistance, a man named Kalniak. To Kalniak they put Mandelbrot’s suggestion.

‘Surely,’ Mandelbrot had suggested, ‘the first men to keep off the list are the ones who are most likely, mentally and physically, to be able to fight in the event of an uprising.’

‘That would make sense,’ Kalniak commented, ‘if there was any realistic hope of an uprising.’

‘But still –’ and this was all Gradowski got to say privately to Kalniak before a prisoner fought his way past Lewental to plead with Kalniak. Whatever Kalniak’s real influence with or standing among the other
Sonderkommando Kapos
, the fact that a fight had broken out just for the opportunity to plead one’s case to him suddenly elevated his stature with tens of desperate men who had seen it. Perhaps talking to Kalniak could keep you off the list.

The next day two of the
Sonderkommando
prisoners whose task it was to bring food to the
Sonderkommando
were told to give a message to a certain prisoner in the kitchen detail. This prisoner was in the resistance and he was told to get a message urgently to the Auschwitz Military Council explaining the situation concerning the 300 men and to plead one last time for the camp-wide uprising to begin that day. The message came back within an hour and a half. Not only would the Auschwitz Military Council not participate in an uprising that day but it urged those
Sonderkommando
resistance members who were not on the list of 300 also not to take part in any uprising. The 300 men, whoever they were, on the list to be given to the SS, were to go to their deaths knowingly, without fighting back and without any assistance from anyone, not even from the other
Sonderkommando
men. That was the message from the camp-wide resistance, the Auschwitz Military Council.

‘Perhaps Kalniak was right,’ Henryk Mandelbrot heard Zalman Lewental say to Zalman Gradowski.

They were lining up in formation in front of Crematorium IV as they had so many times before but they were doing it very slowly. Had the SS noticed? Everyone was twitchy. No one had slept. A list had been made. One of the
Kapos
had it. Which
Kapo?
All anyone knew was that it was too late to influence anybody now.
Scharführer
Busch was there with a group of SS guards. Did these SS men really think that any of the men lined in front of them, men who had day after day, month after month
been forced to witness and participate in the deception and in the mass murder of so many hundreds of thousands of innocents, did any of these SS men really think that a single
Sonderkommando
member thought for a moment that the 300 men whose names were about to be handed over were going to go out to clear rubble?

Neither Lewental nor Mandelbrot saw any of the
Kapos
hand a list to anyone but somehow one of the SS men had it and they saw this SS man hand it over to
Scharführer
Busch. There were men there who knew for certain that their names were on the list. Some of these men had made preparations. They might have trembled lined up there but they had secreted implements, crude weapons of various kinds on their persons. Those there who had worked the night shift in Crematorium IV had, in what they knew to be their last hours, wedged and crammed rags soaked in wood-alcohol and in oil in whatever spaces they could in the crematorium, between the rafters, in the coke room, everywhere. The soaked rags were even placed under some of the three-tier wooden bunks in their barracks block. They hadn’t forgotten that not only people burn, wood burns too. Then there were the tins, small tins partially filled with the gunpowder stolen by the women of the
Pulverraum
and smuggled out by Rosa Rabinowicz and later others. If an uprising started, if a building used for killing was set on fire, perhaps other prisoners, not just
Sonderkommando
men but prisoners all across Auschwitz-Birkenau and maybe even prisoners in some of the subcamps would see it. Maybe others would rise up too. Could that happen? How could they know? This was like no place they had ever known.

How many minutes did they have left to live?
Scharführer
Busch began calling out names from the list. How did Chaim Neuhof’s name get on it? As doomed men began stepping slowly forward, it occurred to
Scharführer
Busch that the formation in its entirety seemed somewhat short, that men were missing. Suspecting that some of them must have been hiding, he dispatched several SS men to Crematorium IV to search for the missing prisoners. The rags, the weapons, men who may have been hiding there, everything was about to be discovered.

There was nothing to wait for any more, nothing. Whether Chaim Neuhof was the first to realise this no one will ever know. But he was the
first to act on this realisation. From the ranks of the condemned men he called out ‘Hoorah!’ and with an axe that he had managed to hide in his pants he lunged at one of the SS men about to search Crematorium IV. Suddenly a torrent of stones, gravel and assorted objects came flying at the SS men from the ranks of the prisoners chosen to be ‘transferred’. Some of the SS retreated from the attacking
Sonderkommando
men, two fleeing on bicycles. Others began firing indiscriminately at both the condemned and the other
Sonderkommando
men.

Nobody now was waiting for anything.
Sonderkommando
men from both groups began attacking the SS and before long smoke could be seen coming from Crematorium IV. This was not the usual smoke from the burning of corpses. This smoke was unprecedented. Crematorium IV was on fire. Not Jews for once, it was the building itself that was burning. There were explosions too. The Jews were tossing grenades of some kind. And even as
Sonderkommando
men were falling before a rain of bullets, people, prisoners of all nationalities from other parts of the camp, stopped what they were doing to look up. Jews were fighting back. Inconceivable though it was, this was no fantasy. Somehow these
Sonderkommando
men were destroying one of the crematoria even amid a ceaseless hail of bullets.

Over at Crematorium II the
Sonderkommando
men heard the wail of a siren above the non-stop gunfire. In astonishment they saw that Crematorium IV was on fire. Believing that this was the start of the long hoped-for uprising, they attacked the SS men guarding them. Hidden caches of weapons including the homemade grenades were retrieved in the commotion. A pair of long-hidden insulated pliers was dug up and a hole large enough for people to get through was cut in the electrified perimeter fence. The SS were so shocked to be attacked in what appeared to them to be an organised uprising that in the time it took them to implement a coordinated response a large number of the
Sonderkommando
were able to reach the hole in the fence. To stem the firing the SS were now directing in that vicinity, the prisoners there lobbed grenades at them. By this time there were
Sonderkommando
men on the other side of the fence. Not knowing which way to run they followed the first to escape and headed towards the nearby town of Rajsko.

Shot at by the SS pursuing them, many were killed or wounded, but some of them made it the two kilometres to Rajsko where, in terror, in exhilaration, they took shelter in a barn they’d come upon. Those Poles in Rajsko who in the middle of an October afternoon saw these men run into the barn could not understand what they were witnessing. They saw the SS arrive with dogs and try to break into the barn but the
Sonderkommando
men had had just enough time to bar the very stout door. Temporarily safe, the escapees inside the barn reassessed their position. What to do next depended on what was happening outside. Perhaps other parts of the fence had been breached. Perhaps prisoners were resisting all over Auschwitz. Perhaps the Russians had finally arrived and were engaging the SS. Maybe this had been the moment when the Polish Home Army had joined with the Auschwitz Military Council and the SS were under siege. Perhaps this was the beginning of the end of this nightmare. They looked at each other. The Nazis seemed to have given up their attempt to get into the barn. Had the local Poles, the men and women of Rajsko, taken up arms? No, there was no resistance from the people of Rajsko, not that afternoon, none that these panting men could hear over their own breathing and the barking of the dogs outside.

The people of Rajsko were civilians. They didn’t fight. The
Sonderkommando
men inside the barn at Rajsko smelled a burning smell, not of corpses but of wood. The men of the Auschwitz Military Council were not on hand, nor the local branch of the Polish Home Army. The SS had set fire to the barn. As the flames gained control and the heat and smoke became unbearable the
Sonderkommando
men were forced to open the door and run for their lives. The Russians were not there, but some of the townspeople of Rajsko were there to see these men run as fast as they could out of the flame-filled barn, only to be gunned down by the machine guns of the waiting SS.