A Murder in Auschwitz (17 page)

“Herr Amsel is correct. How did the watch chain end up in Herr Vogel’s pocket? As Herr Vogel pushed past Herr Amsel and the watch chain was broken, the majority of the chain was hooked around the button on the coat. As he walked away, the full chain, including the fob, went with Herr Vogel. Now, on these army greatcoats you can see that there is a deep seam around the cuff, to give it a turned over appearance. Herr Vogel had his arm held at chest height above this button to buffer himself against the man in front, and when he passed Herr Amsel and was out into a relatively open space he brought this arm down and...” Once again, Meyer stopped the explanation and focussed the jury on the demonstration. Meyer moved his arm down, catching the fob on the cuff seam and placed his hand in his pocket.

The chain slipped into his pocket like quicksilver.

It took the jury less than thirty minutes to return their verdict; not guilty.

Auschwitz, 29th October 1943

THERE were new arrivals at the camp almost every day. Sometimes there would be a number of them allocated to Hut 72. They would be sitting against the wall of the hut, or on the wooden bunks as Meyer and the others arrived back from eating their thin soup and black bread after their day in the work group.

Occasionally, scuffles would break out between those who had just arrived and had claimed someone’s bunk and the original occupant, but more often than not the new arrivals were so shocked by their experience that they sat dumbly on the floor.

Meyer wanted to help them, warn them about what this place was. But he knew it would not be long before they knew the truth, if they did not know already. He wanted to tell them not to worry about not having a bunk, there would be some free by tomorrow morning. He wanted to tell them about the hunger that they would feel and how it would subside. He wanted to tell them about the tiredness and the fear and how these were the enemies here, not the men wearing the death’s-head insignia. But he did not tell them any of these things. He did not want to share what humanity and feelings and love he had any further than they were already stretched, as if by giving his care and attention to them as they sat there bewildered these things would be stretched to breaking point, until the inevitable happened and they died, and his love would snap like an elastic band.

Meyer walked past the newcomers and sat on his bunk. He had a middle bunk in a stack of three. The cracked wood of the bed acted like a spring, and Meyer kept that extra comfort of his bed secret, even from Geller.

He removed his clogs and rubbed his feet. This was a ritual which many of those in work groups who had to march long distances each day performed. He had noticed it in others on his very first evening in the camp, and by the next day he was doing exactly the same.

The man who slept on the opposite side of Meyer from Geller was a German Jew from Hamburg, Jan Sollner, a piano teacher by trade; his long, thin fingers struggled with the long hard work in the forest. His musician’s body struggled to cope with the daily toil they all faced. When Meyer had first arrived, he had noticed Sollner had a cough which bothered him. Now though, it barely stopped. Sollner was often bent double, coughing up phlegm, and yesterday he had started to cough up blood.

Sollner lay on his side, facing Meyer. His lips were blue and his eyes were closed tight as another wave of coughing engulfed him. Once it had passed, he opened his eyes again.

“I am sorry, Manfred. I must keep you awake at night,” he croaked.

Meyer smiled kindly at him. “You are joking with me, Jan,” he said. “Your coughing is nothing to the screaming and shouting that goes on through the night in here. Anyway, you know me, as soon as I close my eyes, I am out for the count.”

Sollner started to laugh, but this was commandeered by a coughing fit. He turned away from Meyer to save him from yet another bout of barked coughs. As he turned, Meyer noticed a thin line of blood running from Sollner’s mouth.

“It’s the stomach that hurts the most, Manfred,” said Sollner when it had subsided. “The stomach muscles hurt so much from all of the coughing. I am sorry.”

“Hey Jan, I told you. Don’t be silly. You have nothing to be sorry about,” replied Meyer.

“I have tried everything, you know. To try and stop it. I have tried coughing in musical time. I thought if I could master the timing of the coughs, I could control them and get them to stop.”

Meyer laid a hand on Sollner’s back as he began another fit of wheezing coughs. “Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked, but Sollner shook his head through the coughing.

Meyer lay back on his bunk, beaten from the day’s work. He turned to see Geller watching Sollner. His face betrayed his concern for the piano teacher. Meyer bid Geller and Sollner good night and felt his eyelids drooping, heavy with the day’s drudgery.

Unusually, Meyer woke in the middle of the night. The air was full of snoring, but the insidious silence which haunted the camp during the day and filled every waking moment when orders were not being barked at you had gone. A kinder, warmer silence now filled the spaces between the snores and mumbled dreams of the exhausted. He looked at where he thought the back of Sollner’s head would be. His cough had stopped, and an easy peace engulfed him for the first time in the short while that Meyer had known him. Meyer felt a fatherly smile cross his face and closed his eyes, allowing sleep to swim over him once more.

“Get up! Get up!” Langer limped around the hut, shouting at the inmates. “What are you doing? Get up and out! Come on, hey you! Yes, you! Leave him and get outside!”

Meyer and Geller looked at each other. They both made it their first task for the day to be outside before Langer had made it to their part of the hut. Meyer reached out his hand and shook Sollner to wake him.

“You won’t be able to wake him this morning.” It was Ziegler; the Pole from Sollner’s other side. “He won’t be coughing any more I am afraid. He’s gone.”

Meyer felt a dreadful sadness overcome him. He had not known Sollner very well. He had not even been in the same working party, although Sollner had also worked in the forest. But after weeks of him being tortured as his lungs slowly gave up, he had been given a last night of peace from the torment. For some reason, it had reminded Meyer of watching his children sleep at night, that unqualified sleep of the innocent.

“Come on Manfred,” came Geller's voice. “Let’s go. He is in a better place now.”

Meyer’s hand lingered on Sollner’s still-warm shoulder, and then he followed Geller out into the cold of the early morning.

After a day in the forest, Meyer and Geller returned to the hut with the rest of their work party to find that Sollner’s bunk had been claimed, not by one of the newcomers as Meyer had expected, but by one of the inmates from the other side of the hut. His faded prison uniform looked even greyer than Meyer’s own, and he wore the Star of David badge and a patch showing him to be a Sonderkommando, one of those who worked at the gas chambers and the crematoria. The smell of death sat on him like a mantle of demise.

Meyer nodded a greeting to him as he stretched his toes after releasing them from the clogs. The man held out his hand, which Meyer took. “Rosenmann. Saul Rosenmann.”

Meyer introduced himself and Geller to Rosenmann, and Geller reached over and shook his hand. Rosenmann noticed Geller looking at the Sonderkommando patch.

“I was a flower seller. In Bonn. I sold flowers,” he said, almost as an excuse for what he had to do now. But then he felt the need to qualify his past with what his life had been filled with. “Now I...”

Meyer and Geller both nodded in understanding. Rosenmann gave a broken smile and lay back on the bunk. Meyer had never spoken with a Sonderkommando before. He had imagined them all to be like Langer; brutish, criminals, filled with antipathy and loathing. Rosenmann was not like that at all; he was a Jew and appeared to be gentle and amiable.

It seemed to Meyer that it would be impossible to work at the crematoria and unbearable at the gas chambers. How long could a man survive for, when each day consisted of being so close to those about to die and those who had already been murdered? Maybe it was his lawyer background, or perhaps it was a need to understand this place, but before he knew it, the question had fallen from his lips like a whisper.

“What is it like?”

Rosenmann’s eyes flicked between Meyer and Geller. He did not know who had asked the question, both men were still facing him, but he knew why they had asked it. He had been asked this before, and he had either ignored the question or had given a very brief outline of his duties; move these people over here, move those people in there, take the bodies from there and cremate them. But there was something in the way this was asked, it sounded like they had to know, and it made it feel like he had to tell them. He motioned Meyer and Geller closer to him.

“It is terrible,” he sighed. “Terrible. Everyone asks why. They want to know why I do it, why I am a Sonderkommando and they want to know why it happens.

“The first question is easy. I do it because I am told to. If I were to object? If I were to say ‘no, I won’t do it,’ then I would be next in the gas chamber. So I do it because that is where I am sent every day, just like others are sent to the mines, or the munitions factories, or the forest.”

“We work in the forest,” volunteered Meyer.

“And does anyone question you on why you chop trees and provide wood for the planes, or rifle butts, or fences of your enemy? No, and no-one questions the munitions workers making bombs and bullets for their enemy, or the miners who dig Polish coal to fuel Nazi concentration camps.”

“No,” replied Meyer. “They don’t. I know that there is nothing you can do. You are in the working groups that service the death machine here. I am not sure if there is anything that one man can do.”

Rosenmann nodded. “Yes, that is right. What could I do on my own?”

The three men sat in silence for a moment as the noise of men returning from the working parties continued. Meyer broke the silence.

“If you can’t talk about it, Saul, then that is okay. It must be very difficult.”

Rosenmann nodded his head in agreement again. “Yes, but it’s strange. You can switch off from the horror, to a certain extent, anyway.”

Once more, Rosenmann fell silent and sat staring at his hands. Geller lay back on his bunk and closed his eyes. He had mentioned to Meyer how tired he had been over the past couple of weeks. Everyone was tired. The men in the camp shuffled rather than walked due to their malnutrition. The constant work, the lack of food, and the absence of a rest day took its toll. Sometimes, prisoners would collapse while working, or on the march to or from their daily toil. Mostly, they had fainted, and if it was on the way back to the camp, the guards would order two of the other prisoners to carry them back to their hut. If it was on the way out, they were shot as they lay on the ground. But Geller had seen more than one man drop dead instead. Geller had been tired since the day he arrived there, but now he felt the fatigue attack his body like a cancer. He felt it in every bone, in every muscle and in every nerve. It even seemed to flow around his body with his blood, poisoning him slowly.

Meyer heard the snore behind him. Geller was fast asleep. A few seconds before, he had been sitting next to him. The exhaustion was etched onto Geller’s slumbering face.

“Your friend falls asleep quickly. I think he has been working too hard in the forest,” said Rosenmann.

“I think he needs a holiday,” replied Meyer, and smiled. Rosenmann laughed a throaty chortle.

Meyer lay back on his bunk, enjoying the comforting feeling of his secretly sprung bed taking his weight and bending beneath it. He stretched his legs and arms as far as he could and then relaxed, enjoying the feeling of his muscles starting to unwind and decompress. He had closed his eyes and was preparing to let sleep overwhelm him when Rosenmann whispered, close to his ear, the answer to his question.

“It is terrible. But I try to give those who die there as much dignity as I can. Given the circumstances.”

Meyer opened his eyes and turned away from Geller’s snoring to listen to Rosenmann’s account of the gas chambers and the crematoria.

“When the trains arrive, they have decided who will die, they take them past Doctor Mengele first. He picks out anyone he thinks will be interesting subjects for his experiments. They call him the ‘Angel of Death’, you know.

“The rest are passed up the line to the Sonderkommando. We are guarded all the time but it is us who get them to undress, to run to the gas chambers. They think they are going for a shower to disinfect them in case they have lice, and they run because they are naked. But they are running to their deaths.”

Meyer remembered his arrival and the removal of his clothes and the shower. How he had been made to run to the shower block. How he had tried to hide his modesty.

“So they go into the first gas chamber and, once it is full we close the door. They then run to the next gas chamber. Once that is full, we close the doors. Then the guards drop in the pellets that turn to gas when they get wet. It’s called Zyklon B. I don’t really want to tell you what it is like in the twenty minutes it takes for the gas to kill everyone. Afterwards, we take out the bodies and they go to the crematoria. We each have a station there and we cremate the dead.