The Street Sweeper (64 page)

It was around this time that a woman, a prisoner who had once been housed in the same block as Estusia and Hannah Weiss, was caught with a whole loaf of bread. Beaten but unwilling to betray the origins of the bread, she offered other information that might be of value, information about the prisoner Estusia Weiss who used to receive visits from the prisoner Rosa Rabinowicz of the
Kanada Kommando
. The smuggling of the bread was forgotten about.

Block 11, the camp’s ‘prison within a prison’, was in Auschwitz I, the part of Auschwitz-Birkenau with the gate adorned by ‘
Arbeit macht frei
’. The
Kapo
of Block 11 was a Jew, an unusually tall and strong man known by many more prisoners than had ever seen him as
Kapo
Jakub. It was on the basis of his strength and size that the SS had chosen him to be the
Kapo
of Block 11. Some said he was simple; others made allegations of cruelty about Jakub. Still others who had got out of Block 11 swore that only his timely acts of kindness had saved them. When prisoners locked in the cells of Block 11 heard Jakub approaching their cell they recognised that it was him by his walk and if, from the sound of the footsteps, they believed he was alone, they would call out to him from the dark of the punishment cells.

‘Help me,
Kapo
Jakub. Please help me.’

The call of the prisoners would follow the sound of his footsteps down the blackened concrete corridor. ‘Help me,
Kapo
Jakub. Please help me.’

The year 1944 was coming to an end when Estusia Weiss and her friend Ala, two of the
Pulverraum
workers from the
Weichsel Union Metallwerke
factory were taken to Block 11 for interrogation. Their foreman, Regina, was taken there too, and soon after so was Rosa Rabinowicz. All four of them were beaten viciously, repeatedly. News of their incarceration in Block 11 reached Noah Lewental and others of the resistance movement. So certain were they that under interrogation they would be betrayed that many of them considered suicide.

Rosa Rabinowicz, her face, torso and legs lacerated and bleeding, lay on her back alone in her cell fresh from a beating. Struggling to breathe through broken ribs, she heard the prisoners in the distance announce the movement along the corridor of
Kapo
Jakub.

‘Help me,
Kapo
Jakub. Please help me,’ she heard them call. Without getting up or even trying to get up, she crawled along the floor to the cell door and waited for his step to come closer to her door. Then she started to call out, ‘Help me,
Kapo
Jakub. Please help me.’

Jakub could not go past the cells alone without hearing this cry from inside the cell of every prisoner. ‘Help me,
Kapo
Jakub. Please help me.’ Even prisoners who had never been helped by him at all, who had never spoken to him and who had no reason to expect that he should suddenly risk his life to help them, even these prisoners called out to him from their cells, almost as though in prayer. They called out to him as though to fail to call when he went past would be to limit one’s chance of survival. Those who didn’t call out to him were no longer conscious.

Jakub heard the cries as he made his way along the basement corridor of Block 11 and when he got to the door of Rosa Rabinowicz he heard the broken woman’s feeble cry and he stopped. Far from the loudest cry for his attention, he could have been forgiven for not hearing it, but he was walking slightly more slowly as he approached this particular cell. He knew exactly who it was that lay bleeding there. He had brought bread and water to this cell when its inmate had been unconscious. Jakub knew that this cell contained the woman Rosa, the woman who had smuggled gunpowder to the
Sonderkommando
, gunpowder used in the uprising, the only uprising in the history of the camp. Whatever privilege his position brought him he would try to share with this woman, Rosa Rabinowicz.

When she stopped hearing his steps she wondered if he was still there. Then she heard the keys in the door of her cell and within seconds there stood towering above her the hulking frame of
Kapo
Jakub. The man took a step over her and into the tiny cell. He crouched down and brought to her the bowl of water in the cell. Cradling her head in his lap, he told her that when he counted to three she should swallow and she did. He placed her head gently back on the ground and, still on his knees, he reached over to the bread he had left for her earlier and broke off a
piece to feed her but she was unable to take it in her mouth. Her mouth, swollen and bloodied, could not accept anything solid. The blood from her mouth, fresh from her latest beating, dripped onto his leg. He took some of the bread, softened it in the water and began to feed her.

‘Look at you,’ he said quietly to himself, not expecting any response. But the broken woman with her head in his lap spoke to him between intakes of breath.

‘Bring me Noah, Noah Lewental. Bring me Noah, Jakub, will you?’

‘Who is he?’

‘He’s an electrician … from Ciechanow. Ask around … someone will know him … 
They
will know him,’ she whispered. ‘Can you get him here before I die?’

Some three days later the
Kapo
Jakub received the electrician from Ciechanow, Noah Lewental. It was night and he came to the entrance of Block 11 with two bottles under his arm.

‘Who’s this?’ asked the sleepy SS guard on duty.

‘This is my cousin and this is for you,’ Jakub said, placing the bottles in front of the SS man.

‘What is it? Give it here. Egg liqueur!’ the SS man laughed.

‘Two bottles … for you,’ repeated Jakub.

‘Ach, you Jews! Even here, even now, you can get anything.’

Noah said nothing and watched to see what he would do. The guard opened one of the bottles and took a swig.

‘Jakub, they love you around here. Even the dead send you their tributes. Well, you can have a drink too.’

The SS man gave the bottle to Jakub who pretended to drink from it and then handed it back. Before long the guard had finished the first bottle and quickly moved on to the second.

‘From
Kanada
, yeah?’ said the SS man, now affected by the liqueur.

‘Wherever it’s from, sir, it’s yours now, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, yeah … it’s mine now. That’s exactly right, Jakub. Mine now, isn’t it?’

With a small amount still left in the second bottle, the SS man had fallen asleep and Jakub led Noah Lewental towards Rosa’s cell. He walked so silently behind Jakub that the prisoners on the other side of their cell doors, assuming Jakub was alone, cried out as the two of them passed by.

‘Help me,
Kapo
Jakub. Please help me.’

When they arrived at Rosa’s cell Jakub unlocked the door quickly.

‘Don’t be long. I don’t know how long the guard will sleep. It could be half the night or he could be already waking now,’ he whispered. Pushing Noah inside, he closed the door on them and left, a chorus of prisoners’ cries trailing away after him.

Noah Lewental looked down at the naked body at his feet. It was unrecognisable. Noah wondered if the giant
Kapo
had led him to the wrong place when a voice arose from the badly torn naked body with open wounds that lay without even a blanket or covering of any kind on the grey concrete floor.

‘Noah, is that you?’

‘Rosa?’

‘How did you get here? Are you really here or am I delirious?’

Noah bent down. The voice was hers. This was the woman he had, since childhood, planned to marry, the woman he had lost through an act of adolescent impatience, the woman he’d hurt so much. And now this. What had they done to her?

‘I’m here, of course I’m here,’ he whispered. ‘You sent for me, didn’t you? Is this water?’

‘Yes. I didn’t think Jakub would find you. I didn’t think you’d even get the message before they –’

‘Shhh! Save your strength.’ He cradled her head in his lap and gave her some water. That was when he saw that most of her teeth had been smashed.

‘There’s nothing to save it for,’ she said.

‘Don’t talk like that. We’ll do everything we can to … help you.’

‘Noah, I’m not delirious and time is short. We mustn’t lie to one another. They’re going to kill me. We both know that but I had to tell you –’

‘Shhh! Don’t be so –’

‘Noah, darling, don’t talk down to me. Is it true that your brother died in the uprising?’

‘Zalman? Yes, that’s what I was told.’

‘I heard that too. That’s the only one I gave them.’

‘What?’

‘That’s the only name I gave them when they interrogated me. I heard he was killed so I told them he was my contact, the only one I had.’ Noah Lewental gently stroked the hair on the top of her head and felt it matted with dried blood.

‘Tell them, Noah, tell them, the others in the resistance, tell them Zalman is the only name I gave them and the only one I’m going to give them. Tell them it stops with him. Anyone still alive is safe.’

‘My Rosa! I don’t know if anyone here is safe, not even Jakub.’

‘But tell them, Noah, no one will be killed because of anything I say. Tell me what you know.’

‘About what?’

‘Are the Russians coming?’

‘That’s what we hear. That’s what we always hear … but they never come.’

‘And the uprising, did anyone escape?’

‘As far as I know anyone who escaped was caught and killed. But they destroyed one of the crematoria.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes and they killed some SS men before it was all over.’

‘Noah, you have to survive this.’

‘So do you!’

‘But I’m not going to. You might. You have to survive and make sure the rest of the world knows what happened here.’

‘Who will believe it?’

‘Yes, but you have to keep telling people till everyone knows. Promise me you’ll survive and –’

‘Rosa, you want me to promise something that’s out of my hands.’

‘Yes. Okay, but promise me that if you survive you will tell people what went on here. You have to tell –’

‘Yes, of course. Shhh! Of course I will. What about the others? Do they have any of the other girls?’

‘Yes, they have Estusia and Ala from the
Pulverraum
and Regina too, their foreman. But no one needs to worry about anything they might say. Estusia cares only for her sister and, anyway, I’m the only one they were in contact with outside the
Union Metallwerke
factory whose name they know.’

‘Do you have a message for the sister?’

‘For Estusia’s sister, Hannah?’

‘Yes, maybe I could –’

‘No. Jakub is going to try to smuggle out a letter from Estusia,’ Rosa whispered.

‘Okay.’

‘Noah?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why would
you
need to get a message to her sister?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I thought you said we’re going to be all right?’

She had caught him out and when she managed to lift her hand up to his face she found he was crying. They sat in close to perfect darkness in Block 11 knowing that at any moment Jakub could come back and that Noah would have to leave immediately. He might even be caught on the way out. He didn’t care. He would give his life for her. She knew that now. But they both knew that the SS wouldn’t take his life in exchange for hers. They would simply take both.

He cradled her head as they whispered about their childhood, about Ciechanow, their parents and their siblings. She said her father had seen this coming but then agreed that nobody could have imagined the enormity of what did come. Even when it is over, nobody will quite understand just how bad it was, the scale of it, the relentlessness of it. No, she had to agree, whatever it was her father had predicted, it hadn’t been this. She had a daughter, Noah remembered. The little girl, her name was Elise. Her father had taken her away. Before the war she had tried all that was within her power to find her but could find not a trace of her or of her husband.

‘Maybe she’s alive. Do you think she is?’ Rosa whispered, suddenly like a little girl.

‘Perhaps she is,’ Noah Lewental answered.

‘It was so long ago –’

‘Yes, but don’t you see that helps. It was so long ago that by now she could be anywhere. She might be safe in Russia or England … even America.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes, there was time for –’

Suddenly there was a knock at the door. They had been speaking non-stop for four hours. Now it was 2 am and the
Kapo
Jakub had crept back too quietly for the prisoners’ pleadings to announce him. He knocked once and then opened the door to Rosa’s cell.

‘He’s awake. Come on, you have to go.’ It had come too suddenly for Noah to know what he should say to her. This would be the last time they saw each other and they both knew it. What should he say?

‘Come on!’ Jakub whispered insistently.

‘Rosa, I love you. I’ve always loved you.’

‘Noah, promise me you’ll tell everyone –’

‘Come on!’ Jakub insisted.

‘Tell everyone what happened here.’

‘I will.’

‘Promise me.’

‘Come on!’ said Jakub.

‘I promise you I’ll tell –’

‘Tell everyone,’ she whispered, ‘everyone.’

Noah had placed her head back down on the ground.

‘What if they find me with her?’ he asked Jakub suddenly with his heart beating furiously. ‘Let them take us together. I can’t leave her … I can’t … I don’t care what they do to me.’

‘Maybe
you
don’t but they’ll kill
me
too. We had a deal. Come on!’ Jakub said, dragging him from the cell.

‘Tell everyone!’ Rosa Rabinowicz insisted.

‘I will, I promise.’

‘Everybody!’ she called out, no longer in a whisper but with whatever strength she had. ‘Tell everybody what happened here!’

Jakub had closed the door and now he and Noah were back in the corridor.

‘Tell everybody what happened here,’ Rosa called out. She was hysterical now and had given up any pretence at whispering.

‘Tell everybody what happened here,’ she called out and hearing her say this, her neighbour in the next cell woke and instead of the usual call
to Jakub to save them the neighbour repeated Rosa’s cry as though it had never occurred to him.