Prisoner B-3087 (10 page)

We did not arrive at our destination that night. Nor
the entire next day. And still we had no food or water.
I drifted in and out of sleep, that blessed escape from
hunger. I would have collapsed from exhaustion if I
hadn’t been held up by the prisoners squeezed in
around me.

One morning or night— I couldn’t tell which it
was— I woke up to find the man next to me leaning
heavily on my shoulder. I shook him to wake him up,
but he wouldn’t open his eyes. Something about the
way he stood there, something about the way he moved,
stiff and awkward, made my skin prickle. His flesh was
gray, like a Muselmann’s, his lips cracked and frozen at
the corners. Then I realized: He wasn’t breathing.

The man leaning on me was dead.
I squirmed and twisted, trying to push him away,
but there was nowhere for either of us to go. The men
near me roused from their sleep to grumble at me to be
still, and I gave up. The dead man would be my companion until we got to wherever it was we were going.
I worried I wouldn’t be able to sleep again, knowing
there was a corpse leaning on me, but soon the cold
took me and I reentered the half-awake world of the
barely alive.
I woke again to an orange horizon. A sunrise? A
sunset? My throat was cold and dry, my tongue like
burlap. It had snowed while I was asleep, and the
ventilation grate near me was covered with the stuff —
grayish white from the engine’s smoke. I tried to reach
it with my tongue, to lick some of that precious frozen
water off the grate, but it was just out of reach. My
arms were pinned at my sides by the crush of people in
the car, but I wanted that snow. I needed that snow to
survive. Slowly, painfully, I pulled my arm up between
the dead man and the sleeping one beside us. The
sleeper muttered in his sleep as I jostled him, and he
pushed my hand back down without even waking. But
I had to have that snow. I pushed again, and again the
man pushed back. I elbowed him in his sunken stomach. He whimpered in his sleep and stopped fighting.
My arm was free!
I scooped snow from the grate. My thin fingers
were so cold they were blue, but I didn’t care. I shoved
the snow in my mouth like a toddler eating cake. My
throat was so dry I gagged on it, but I forced the melting snow down, ignoring the shocking pain in my
teeth from the cold. It was water, wonderful water!
Not even a pastry at the corner bakery on Lwowska
Street had ever tasted so good. With a pang I remembered going there on Thursdays with my father, eating
a treat and watching the pigeons in the park while my
father read his newspaper. I pushed the memory away
and reached for more gray snow.
The orange horizon turned out to be a sunrise,
which turned into a bright blue winter morning. Our
train slowed again, this time not for a station. We were
shunted to a side track while another train of cattle
cars passed us, going in the opposite direction. The
other train slowed, then stopped alongside.
“You there,” someone called from across the way.
“You there, in the other train.”
I squinted through the slats in the wall. There were
people in the other train, packed in like us. We were all
Jews being shipped around occupied Poland like coal
or meat.
“What?” a man a meter or two away from me
answered.
“What does our train say? Where are we going?”
the man in the other train asked.
I hadn’t thought the trains would have our destination on them, but most trains did, I remembered.
There were plates at the top that could be switched out
for different destinations. I peered through the slats at
the other car, trying to see.
“Treblinka,” I called, seeing the placard at last. “It
says you’re going to Treblinka.” I didn’t know the
place. “Where are we going?”
“Birkenau,” the man in the other train called. I had
never heard of Birkenau either, but the word spread
through the train in scared whispers.
Birkenau.
Birkenau. Birkenau.
The other train rocked and started moving again,
and soon we too were on our way.
The man next to me, the live one, mumbled and
shook his head.
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s Birkenau? Another
work camp?”
“You don’t go to Birkenau to work,” the man said,
his voice hoarse and dry. “You go there to die. Birkenau
isn’t a concentration camp. It’s a death camp.”
A chill ran through me. The boys at the depot had
been right, I realized. They had known. The Nazis
were going to kill us. They were going to turn us into
soap. The train rocked back and forth, back and forth.
Outside, it began to snow again.
“You want my advice?” the man next to me rasped.
“When they take us to the gas chambers, try to stand
right under the exhaust vents.”
“Is that how you survive?”
The man laughed, or tried to. “No. You won’t survive. None of us will. But if you stand under the
exhaust vents, you won’t suffer long before you die.”

the traIn arrIved at bIrkenau at nIGht.
The cars clanked and groaned as the train came to a
stop half a kilometer outside the gates. It was a cloudy
night, and should have been dark, but the sky was lit
up red like a bonfire. Black chimneys stood up in silhouette against the glowing sky, shooting flames from
their tops, and the smell of burning flesh filled the air.
I gagged.

I waited for the train to move again, to take us into
that awful factory, but we didn’t move. We sat for what
must have been hours, all of us who could see out
watching the flames, knowing that was where we were
going. Why were they holding us here? Was this one
last torture, one last joke? Did they want to drive us to
panic? To madness? If they did, it was working. The
longer we waited, the more anxious I got. What was
going on? Why weren’t we moving?

“What are they waiting for?” I said at last, my voice
hoarse from thirst and fear.
“Don’t you see the fires in the chimneys?” a man
next to me said. “They have to finish off the last trainload before they have room for us.”
So that was it. We were just another raw material,
waiting to be processed. Shovel us in, shovel us out.
I dozed again. Every time I woke, I was still in the
cold train car, a dead man leaning against me. At last,
the train jolted and began to move, and I woke for
good to a pale yellow sun rising above the trees in the
distance. They were taking us inside to the furnaces.
They were taking us inside to die.
The train-car door opened. For a few steps the dead
body next to me came with us, held up between the
living as we pushed for the door. But soon there was
more space, and he fell, slumping to the floor with the
others who had died on the trip. There were dozens
of them, rag and bone skeletons who had perished of
hunger, or thirst, or the cold, or suffocation, or overwork. We climbed over them, gulping in the fresh air
outside before the
kapo
s and soldiers whipped us and
shouted at us to line up.
We assembled in a field just beyond the train cars,
those of us who survived, looking more dead than
alive. After another roll call to see which of us were
still alive, the Nazis marched us toward one of the big
brick buildings with chimneys.
So this was it. The reality began to sink in, and I
slumped under its weight. They really were going to
kill us. I had come so far, endured so much agony and
suffering.
I had survived the work gangs in the ghetto. Baked
bread under cover of night. Hidden in a pigeon coop.
Walked the streets of occupied Kraków. Had a midnight bar mitzvah in the basement of an abandoned
building. I had watched my parents be taken away to
their deaths, had avoided Amon Goeth and his dogs,
had survived the salt mines of Wieliczka and the sick
games of Trzebinia. I had done so much to
live
, and
now, here, the Nazis were going to take all that away
with their furnace!
I started to cry, the first tears I had shed since Moshe
had died. Why had I worked so hard to survive if it
was always going to end like this? If I had known, I
wouldn’t have bothered. I would have let them kill me
back in the ghetto. It would have been easier that way.
All that I had done was for nothing.
In a large empty room we were ordered to undress
and pile our striped uniforms in a corner. In a different corner was another stack of clothes— silks of
bright red and blue and purple and green. Gypsy
clothes. Now we knew who had fed the fires of
Birkenau while we waited our turn outside. I was still
crying as I pulled my shirt off and added it to the pile.
The tears came unbidden, but I didn’t try to stop them.
Some of the other men were crying. Most weren’t. I
didn’t care. I was tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of
being brave. Tired of surviving.
They whipped us and beat us again to herd us into
the next room, where showerheads lined the ceiling. I
remembered what the man on the train had said, that
you died fastest if you stood underneath one of the
showerheads, where the gas came out. Instead I moved
away from them, near one of the stone columns set
throughout the room.
They packed us in again, just like on the train, but
there was still a little room to move. When the door
clanked shut, some of the men cried out. By now we
all knew why we were here, and what they were going
to do to us. Some people panicked and beat on the
door, yelling for the Nazis to let us out, to have mercy,
to spare us. Some people cursed them. Some people
closed their eyes and muttered prayers. Some just
stared off into space, waiting to die.
Tears streamed down my face, tears I didn’t know I
had left, and I slid down the column to the ground,
burying my head in my hands. Mother, Father, my
aunts and uncles, my cousins, my friends in Kraków, I
missed them all so much.
We waited, but no gas came. The cries of the men
grew louder and more desperate. I stayed frozen to
where I sat, not knowing what to think. Why were
they waiting now? Maybe someone was standing on
the hose, I thought crazily, and I started to giggle. Yes.
That was it. Or maybe they couldn’t get the fire for the
furnace going. Maybe the match kept blowing out. Or
the kindling wouldn’t catch fire. I laughed out loud at
that, and a prisoner standing over me looked down
at me like I was insane. Maybe I was. The Nazis had
finally broken me. It was all a big joke. I could see that
now. There was no rhyme or reason to whether we
lived or died. One day it might be the man next to you
at roll call who is torn apart by dogs. The next day it
might be you who is shot through the head. You could
play the game perfectly and still lose, so why bother
playing at all?
Still the gas didn’t come. I pulled myself to my feet
and pushed my way through the men until I was
standing right underneath one of the showerheads.
“Go on!” I yelled at the showerhead. “Go on, do it!
I dare you!” I laughed again. “What are you waiting
for?” I cried. “Kill me! I give up! You win!”
The pipes rattled and moaned. Something was
finally coming out. The men in the room got quiet,
like we were all holding our breaths, and I reached my
arms up toward the ceiling.
Kill me
, I prayed.
Please kill me and put an end to
this. I’m ready.
Water rained down on me. Freezing water so cold it
made me scream. Water! Not gas! I was going to live!
I laughed and cried, and so did the other men. We celebrated as we shivered, hugging one another and
shaking hands, all of us granted a last-minute reprieve
by the Nazis.
I was alive.