Spark of Life (30 page)

The squad leaders were undecided. They didn’t know where to send the prisoners. No one dreamed of leading them to an air-raid cellar. In any case, the cellars were filled with civilians. On the other hand, the SS themselves were not eager to remain unprotected. Several of them quickly searched the neighboring houses. They found a concrete cellar.

The tone of the sirens changed. The SS made a dash for the cellar. They left only two guards at the front door and two at each of the street entrances. “Kapos, foremen, see that no one budges! Anyone moving will be shot!”

The prisoners’ faces grew tense. They stared at the walls in front of them and waited. They had not been given orders to lie down; it was easier for the SS to guard them standing up. They stood there silently, crowded together, surrounded by the kapos and foremen. Suddenly the pointer appeared among them. It had torn itself loose
and was searching for 7105. Finding him, it jumped up and tried to lick his face.

For a moment the noise ceased. In the unexpected silence, which was like an airless room and tore at every nerve, suddenly the sounds of a piano could be heard. They rang out loud and clear but were distinctly audible only for a short while. Werner recognized it, however, in the immense concentration of listening, as the choir of the prisoners from
Fidelio
. It couldn’t be a radio. The station did not broadcast any music during the air-raid alarm—it could only be a gramophone someone had forgotten to turn off, or else someone playing the piano at an open window.

The noise started again. Werner clung with his full power of concentration to the few bars he had heard. He pressed his jaws together and tried to continue them in his mind. He didn’t want to think of bombs and death. If he succeeded in remembering the melody he would be saved. He closed his eyes and felt the hard knots of effort behind his brow. He must not die now. Not in this senseless way. He did not even want to think of it. He must remember the melody; the melody of those prisoners who had been freed. He clenched his fists and tried to go on hearing the sounds of the piano; but they had been drowned in the metallic raging of horror.

The first explosion shook the town. The shrill yelling of the falling bombs cut through the howling of the sirens. The ground shook. A chunk of molding fell slowly off one wall. Several of the prisoners had thrown themselves onto the rubble. Foremen came running. “Get up! Get up!”

Their voices couldn’t be heard. They tugged at the men. Goldstein saw the skull of one prisoner, who had thrown himself down, crack and the blood gush forth. The man standing beside him grabbed his stomach and fell forward. They had been wounded not
by bomb splinters but by the SS who had fired at them. The shots couldn’t be heard.

“The cellar!” shouted Goldstein to Werner through the din. “The cellar there! They won’t come after us!”

They stared at the entrance. It seemed to grow bigger. The darkness within was cool safety. It was a black whirlpool which seemed almost impossible to resist. As though hypnotized, the prisoners stared at it. Their lines swayed. Werner held Goldstein back. “No!” He was staring at the cellar himself and shouting through the noise. “No! Not that! We’d all be shot! No! Stand still!”

Goldstein turned his gray face toward him. His eyes lay in it like flat shining pieces of slate. His mouth was twisted with effort. “Not to hide in!” he muttered. “To escape! Run through it! There’s an exit in the back!”

It hit Werner like a blow in the stomach. He suddenly began to tremble. It wasn’t his hands or his knees that trembled; but his veins deep within him. His blood was quivering. He knew that an escape was highly unlikely to succeed, but the thought alone was temptation enough; to run away, to steal clothes in some house and to vanish in the confusion.

“No!” He thought he was whispering, but he was shouting through the turmoil. “No!” It wasn’t meant only for Goldstein; it was for himself. “Not now! Not now!” He knew it was madness; everything they had so far achieved would be endangered by it, comrades would be killed, ten for each of those who attempted escape, a blood bath in this dense crowd; new regulations in the camp—and yet there it yawned and tempted—“No!” shouted Werner and held Goldstein back, and thereby himself.

The sun! thought Lewinsky. This damned sun! It revealed everything mercilessly. Why didn’t they shoot the sun? It was as though one were standing naked under enormous spotlights, a sitting target for the planes’ telescopic sights. If only a cloud
would appear, just for a moment! Streams of sweat poured down his body.

The walls shook. A gigantic concussion thundered nearby, and into the thunder there slowly fell a great segment of wall containing an empty window frame. As it came tumbling over the prisoners it didn’t look particularly dangerous. The segment was about fifteen feet wide. Only the one prisoner over whom the empty window frame had fallen was still standing, staring about him in amazement. He couldn’t understand why he suddenly found himself standing up to his stomach in rubble and yet alive. Beside him legs, sticking out of the fallen wreckage, jerked up and down a few times and then lay still.

The pressure slowly subsided. At first it was almost unnoticeable, only the clamp around the brain and ears became slightly looser. Then consciousness began to filter through like weak light through a shaft. The din raged as before, yet suddenly everyone knew it was over.

The SS crept out of their cellar. Werner glanced at the wall in front of him. Gradually it turned again into an ordinary sunlit wall through which a passage had been cleared—no longer a glaring block of mockery wherein raged a whirlpool of dark hope. At his feet he saw again the dead face with the beard; and he saw the legs of his buried comrades. Then surprisingly he heard once more the sound of the piano through the subsiding roar of guns. He pressed his lips tight together.

Commands rang out. The surviving prisoner who had stood in the window frame climbed out of the rubble. His right foot was twisted. He raised it and stood on one leg. He didn’t dare to let himself fall down. One of the SS-men came running up. “Get going! Dig out those men there!”

The prisoners tore away at the rubble and stones. They worked with hands, picks and shovels. It wasn’t long before they had uncovered their comrades. There were four. Three were dead. One was still alive. They lifted him out. Werner looked around for help. He saw the woman with the red blouse come out of the doorway. She had not fled to the air-raid cellar. Carefully she carried a tin bowl of water and a towel. Paying no attention to anything, she carried the water past the SS and put it down beside the wounded man. The SS glanced at one another undecided, but didn’t say a word. She washed the face clean.

The wounded man vomited bloody foam. The woman wiped it off. One of the SS-men started laughing. He had an immature, lumpy face with eyelashes so light that the pale eyes appeared naked.

The flak ceased. In the silence the piano could be heard resounding again. Werner now saw where it came from; from a window in the first floor of the grocery store; a pale man in spectacles was sitting there playing the choir of the prisoners on an upright brown piano. The SS grinned. One of them tapped his forehead. Werner wasn’t sure whether the man had played for himself in order to get through the bombardment or whether his playing had meant something else. He decided to believe it had been meant as a message. He always chose to believe in the better, provided it entailed no risks. It made life easier.

People came running back. The SS resumed their military attitude. Commands rang out. The prisoners fell into line. The squad leader ordered an SS-man to stay with the dead and wounded; then came the command to double march down the street. The last bomb had struck an air-raid cellar. The prisoners were to dig it out.
The crater stank of acids and sulphur. On its edge a few trees leaned over, their roots exposed. The railing around the public lawn had been wrenched out and pointed up to the sky. The bomb had not struck the cellar directly; it had flattened it out sideways and buried it.

The prisoners worked more than two hours over the entrance. They cleared the staircase step by step. It had been knocked askew. They all worked as fast as they could; they worked as though those buried here were their own comrades.

By the end of another hour they had cleared the entrance. Long before this they had begun to hear screams and whimperings. The cellar must have been getting air from somewhere. As they made the first opening the screaming increased. A head shoved itself through and yelled, and immediately beneath it appeared two hands which scratched in the rubble as though an enormous mole were working its way out.

“Look out!” shouted a foreman. “It can still collapse!”

The hands went on scratching. Then the head was dragged down from within and another appeared, yelling. It, too, was pulled back. The people within were fighting in panic for a place in the light.

“Shove them back! They’ll get hurt! First the hole must be made bigger. Shove them back!”

They pushed the faces back with their hands. The faces bit their fingers. With their picks they tore the concrete loose. They worked as though their own lives were at stake. At last the opening was big enough for the first one to crawl through. He was a powerful man. Lewinsky recognized him at once. He was the one with the mustache whom he had seen standing in the grocery store. He had worked himself to the front and shoved and moaned to get through.
His stomach got stuck. The yelling within increased; he was darkening the cellar. They dragged at his legs to pull him back. “Help!” he screamed in a high whistling voice. “Help! Help me out! Out of here! Out! I promise to—I’ll give you—”

His small black eyes started from their sockets in his round face. “Help! Gentlemen! Please! Gentlemen!” His Hitler mustache quivered. He resembled a trapped seal.

They seized him by the arms and finally pulled him through. He fell, jumped up and ran away without another word. They pressed a board against the entrance and enlarged it. Then they stepped back.

The people scrambled out. Women, children, men—some hastily, pale, sweating, having escaped a grave—others hysterical, sobbing, screaming, cursing—and then slowly and silently came those who had not been seized by the panic.

They ran and climbed past the prisoners. “Gentlemen!” whispered Goldstein. “Did you hear that? Please, gentlemen! The man meant us—”

Lewinsky nodded. “I’ll give you—” he repeated the words of the seal. “Nothing,” he added; “scrammed like a monkey he did.” He looked at Goldstein. “What’s wrong with you?”

Goldstein leaned against him. “Damn funny!” He could hardly breathe. “Instead of their setting us free,” he panted, “we have freed them!”

He giggled and slowly toppled over sideways. They took hold of him and lowered him slowly onto a mound of earth. Then they waited until the bunker was empty.

They stood there, the prisoners of many years, and watched those who had been prisoners for a few hours hurry past them. Lewinsky remembered that something similar had happened once before—when the prisoners had met the procession of refugees from the town on the road. He saw the servant girl in the blue dress with white
spots, crawling out of the entrance. She shook her skirts and smiled at him. A one-legged soldier with crutches followed. He raised himself, put the crutches under his arms and saluted the prisoners before he went on. One of the last to appear was a very old man. His face had long wrinkles like those of a bloodhound. He looked at the prisoners. “Thank you,” he said. “There are still some people buried in there.” Slowly, fragile and with dignity, he walked up the crooked steps. After he had gone the prisoners went down into the bunker.

They were marching back. They were done in. They carried their dead and wounded. The ones who had been buried alive had died in the meantime. A magnificent sunset colored the sky. Its light filled the air, and so vast was its beauty that it seemed as though time stood still and for one hour there could be neither ruins nor death.

“Nice bunch of heroes we are!” said Goldstein. He had recovered from his attack. “Working our fingers to the bone for those who do nothing for us.”

Werner looked at him. “You’re not to go out with the clearing gang again. It’s madness. It’ll kill you, however scarce you make yourself.”

“What else can I do? Wait till the SS catch me up there?”

“We’ve got to find something else for you.”

Goldstein smiled wearily. “I’m gradually getting fit for the Small camp, eh?”

Werner showed no surprise. “Why not? It’s safe and it might be useful to have one of us in there.”

The kapo who had kicked 7105 came up to him. He walked beside him for a while, then pushed something into his hand and fell back again. 7105 looked at it. “A cigarette,” he said, surprised.

“They’re growing soft,” declared Lewinsky. “The ruins are getting on their nerves. They’re thinking of the future.”

Werner nodded. “Keep that kapo in mind. Maybe we can make use of him.”

They dragged themselves along through the soft light. “A town,” said Muenzer after a while. “Houses. Free people. Three yards away. It’s as though one were no longer so completely cooped up.”