Spark of Life (2 page)

At first there were only two. A few seconds later they had multiplied and soon after it seemed as though the whole town below were shrieking. It shrieked from the roofs and out of the streets, from the towers and out of the factories, it lay open in the sun, nothing in it seemed to stir, and yet it shrieked suddenly as if it were a paralyzed animal that sees death and cannot run away—it shrieked with sirens and steam whistles towards the sky, where all was quiet.

Instantly, 509 had ducked. It was forbidden to be outside the barrack during air-raid alarms. He could have tried to get up and run, but he was too weak to keep going fast enough and the barrack was too far; meanwhile a jittery new guard could have fired at him. He crept back a few yards as quickly as he could to a shallow fold in the ground, pressed himself into it and drew the borrowed clothes over himself. He looked just like someone who had dropped dead. This often happened and did not arouse suspicion. The alarm would not last long, in any case. During the last few months the town had had one every few days and nothing had ever happened. The planes had always flown on in the direction of Hanover and Berlin.

The camp sirens joined in. Then, after some time, came the second
alarm. The howling rose and fell, as though worn-out discs were revolving on gigantic gramophones. The planes were approaching the town. 509 knew this, too. It didn’t affect him. His enemy was not the one against whom the town was shrieking. His enemy was the first machine gunner to notice that he was not dead. What went on outside the barbed wire did not concern him.

He breathed with difficulty. The stuffy air under the coat turned into black cotton wool which piled itself up thicker and thicker above him. He lay in the hollow of the ground as though in a grave—and gradually it seemed to him as though it really were his grave—as if he would never be able to get up again, as if this were the end and he would have to remain lying here and die, finally overcome by the last weakness against which he had fought for so long. He tried to resist it but it helped little; he only felt it all the stronger, a strange resigned waiting which spread within him, within him and beyond him as if suddenly everything were waiting—as if the town were waiting, as if the air were waiting, as if even the light were waiting. It was like a beginning of a solar eclipse when the colors have already taken on the hue of lead and the distant foreboding of a dead sunless world—a vacuum, a waiting without breathing to discover whether or not death will once more pass by—

The blow was not violent; but it was unexpected. And it came from a side which seemed more protected than any other. 509 felt it as a hard push deep out of the ground against the stomach. At the same time the howling outside was cut through by a high, steel-like whirring, which increased furiously, similar to the sound of the sirens and yet completely different. 509 did not know which came first, the push out of the ground or the whirring and the following crash—but he knew that neither had been present in any
previous alarm, and when it was repeated closer and stronger, above him and below him, he also knew what it must be—for the first time the planes had not flown on. The town was being bombarded.

The ground trembled again. It seemed to 509 as if mighty underground rubber truncheons were hitting him. Suddenly he was fully awake. The death-weariness had vanished like smoke before a storm. Each blow from the ground became a blow in his brain. For some time he continued to lie still—then, almost without realizing what he did, he carefully stretched out one hand and lifted the coat high enough in front of his face to peer down at the town.

Slowly and playfully the railroad station unfolded and lifted itself into the air. It looked almost graceful when the golden cupola sailed above the trees of the town park and disappeared. The heavy explosions didn’t seem to belong to it at all—everything was far too slow. Even the noise of the flak was drowned in them like the yelping of terriers in the deep bark of a great Dane. With the next mighty crash one of the towers of St. Catherine’s church began to bend. It also fell very slowly and during its fall broke calmly into several pieces—as if it were a slow-motion picture and not reality.

Fountains of vapor now grew up like mushrooms between the houses. 509 still hadn’t the feeling of destruction; invisible giants were playing down there, that was all. In the undamaged sections of the town, smoke continued peacefully to rise from the chimneys; the river reflected the clouds as before, and the puffs of flak hemmed the sky as if it were a harmless cushion whose seams were everywhere bursting and ejecting flakes of gray-white cotton.

A bomb fell far outside the town into the meadows which rose up to the camp. Still 509 didn’t feel any fear; all this was much too far away from the narrow world which was all he still knew. Fear one could feel about burning cigarettes on eyes and testicles, about weeks in the hunger-bunker—a stone coffin in which one could neither stand nor lie—about the rack on which one’s kidneys were
crushed, about the torture chamber in the left wing near the gate; about Steinbrenner, about Breuer, about the camp leader Weber—but even this had somewhat paled since 509 had been moved to the Small camp. One had to be able to forget quickly in order to find the strength to live on. Besides, after ten years the Mellern concentration camp had grown rather tired of torture; even a fresh, idealistic SS-man grew bored in time with torturing skeletons. They could not stand much and did not react enough. Only when a fresh batch of strong men capable of suffering arrived did the old patriotic zeal sometimes flare up. Then the familiar howling was heard again at night and the SS squads looked a little more animated, as after a good meal of roast pork with potatoes and red cabbage. Otherwise, the camps in Germany had become rather humane during the war years. One only gassed, clubbed and shot, or simply worked people insensible and then left them to starve. The fact that off and on in the crematorium a live man was burned with the dead was caused more by overwork and the fact that some skeletons hadn’t moved for a long time than by evil intent. Actually, this happened only when it was necessary to make room quickly for new transports by mass liquidations. Even the starving to death of those incapable of work was pursued not too brutally in Mellern; in the Small camp there was always still something to eat and with it veterans like 509 had managed to create records in staying alive.

The bombardment suddenly ceased. Only the flak still raged. 509 raised the coat a little higher so that he could see the nearest machine-gun tower. The post was empty. He looked further to the right and then to the left. There, too, the towers were without guards. The SS squads had everywhere climbed down and made for safety; they had good air-raid shelters next to the barracks. 509 threw off the coat altogether and crept nearer to the barbed
wire. He supported himself on his elbows and stared down into the valley.

Now the town burned everywhere. What had formerly looked playful had meanwhile changed into what it really was: fire and destruction. Yellow and black like a gigantic mollusk of annihilation, the smoke hovered in the streets and devoured the houses. Flames flared up everywhere. From the railroad station an immense sheaf of sparks shot up. The broken tower of St. Catherine’s church began to blaze and along it tongues of fire licked like pale flashes of lightning. But unperturbed, as though nothing had happened, the sun stood in golden glory behind it all; and there seemed something almost ghostlike in the appearance of the blue and white sky, looking just as gay as before and the forests and mountain chains all around lying calm and unaffected in the gentle light—as if only the town had been condemned by an unknown, sinister judgment.

509 stared down. He forgot all caution and stared down He knew the town only through the barbed wire and he had never been in it; but during the ten years he had spent in the camp it had become for him more than just a town.

At first it had been the almost unbearable image of lost freedom. Day after day he had stared down at it—he had seen it with its carefree life when, after a special treatment by the camp leader Weber, he had hardly been able to crawl any more; he had seen it with its towers and houses as he hung on the cross with dislocated arms; he had seen it with the white barges on its river and its automobiles driving into the springtime while he urinated blood from his crushed kidneys; his eyes had burned whenever he had seen it and it had been a torture, a torture that had been added to all the others of the camp.

Then he had begun to hate it. The time had passed and nothing had changed in the town, no matter what happened up here. The
smoke from its cook stoves had gone on rising every day, uncontaminated by the fumes from the crematorium; its sports grounds and parks had been full of crowds while at the same time hundreds of hunted creatures had perished on the dance ground of the camp. Flocks of holiday-happy people had wandered out every summer into the woods while columns of prisoners dragged their dead and murdered back from the quarries. He had hated it because he had thought that he and the other prisoners had been forgotten forever.

Finally the hatred, too, had died down. The fight for a crust of bread had become more important than anything else, and almost equally so the knowledge that hatred and memories could destroy an endangered self as easily as pain. 509 had learned to shut himself up, to forget and no longer to worry about anything but naked existence from one hour to another. He had grown indifferent to the town, and its unchanged aspect was from now on only a sad symbol of the fact that his fate too would not change any more.

Now it was burning. He felt his arms trembling. He tried to suppress it but he couldn’t; it only became stronger. Everything in him was suddenly loose and without connection. His head ached as though it were hollow and someone were drumming inside it.

He closed his eyes. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want anything to come up in him again. He had crushed and buried all hope and it had cost much pain to bury. He let his arms slide to the ground and laid his face on his hands. The town had nothing to do with him. He did not want it to have anything to do with him. He wanted unconcerned as before to let the sun shine on the dirty parchment that was stretched as skin over his skull, he wanted to breathe, to kill lice and not to think—as he had been doing for a long time.

He couldn’t do it. The trembling in him wouldn’t stop. He rolled round on his back and stretched out flat. Above him now
was the sky with the little clouds of flak shot. They dissolved quickly and drifted along before the wind. Thus he lay a while; then this too he couldn’t stand any more. The sky became a blue and white abyss into which he seemed to fly. He turned round and sat up. He no longer looked at the town. He looked at the camp, and he looked at it as if for the first time he expected help from there.

The barracks dozed as before in the sun. On the dance ground the four men were still hanging on the crosses. The squad leader Breuer had disappeared, but the smoke from the crematorium continued to rise; it had only become thinner. Either they were just burning children or orders had been given to cease work.

509 forced himself to observe everything carefully. This was his world. No bomb had hit it. There it lay as pitiless as ever. It alone ruled him, and all that out there on the other side of the barbed wire didn’t concern him.

At that moment the flak stopped. It hit him as if a belt of noise, closed tight round him, had cracked. For a second he thought that he had only been dreaming and had just waked up. With a start he turned round.

He had not been dreaming. There lay the town, burning. There were fumes and destruction and it had something to do with him after all. He could no longer recognize what had been hit, he saw only the smoke and the fire, everything else had grown blurred, but it didn’t make any difference. The town burned, the town, which had seemed unchangeable, as unchangeable and indestructible as the camp.

He started. He felt suddenly as though behind him from every tower all the camp’s machine guns were turned on him. Quickly he glanced round. Nothing had happened. The towers were as empty as before. In the streets, too, no one could be seen. But it didn’t help; a wild fear had suddenly seized him like a fist in the neck and
shook him. He didn’t want to die! Not now! Not any longer! Hastily he grabbed his clothes and crawled back. He got entangled with Lebenthal’s coat and moaned and cursed and pulled it away from under his knees and crawled on towards the barracks, hastily, deeply excited and confused, as if he were fleeing from something other than death alone.

BARRACK 22 HAD
two wings, each of which was commanded by two room seniors. In the second section of the second wing lived the Veterans. It was the narrowest and the dampest part, but that worried them little; important to them was only that they were together. This gave each of them more power of resistance. Dying was just as contagious as typhus, and singly one easily succumbed in the general croaking, whether one wanted to or not. Several together could defend themselves better. When one man felt like giving up, his comrades helped him to hold out. The Veterans in the Small camp didn’t live longer because they had more to eat; they lived because they had preserved a desperate remnant of resistance.