Spark of Life (34 page)

THE TRANSPORT CAME
as a surprise. The railroad connections into the town from the west had been interrupted for several days. After they had been repaired a number of boxcars had arrived with one of the first trains. They were supposed to continue to an extermination camp. At night, however, the connections had been bombed again. One whole day the train had stood on the tracks; then the inmates were sent to the Mellern camp.

They were exclusively Jews. Jews from all over Europe. There were Polish and Hungarian, Rumanian and Czech, Russian and Greek Jews; Jews from Yugoslavia and Holland and Bulgaria and even some from Luxembourg. They spoke a dozen different languages and most of them didn’t understand one another. Even the Yiddish they had in common seemed to differ. They had been two thousand and now they were five hundred. A few hundred lay dead in the train.

Neubauer was beside himself. “Where on earth shall we put them? The camp’s overcrowded as it is! And besides, they haven’t been officially assigned to us! It has nothing to do with us! This is a crazy mess! There’s no order left! What on earth’s happening?”

He paced up and down in his office. On top of all his personal worries, now came this, too! His sense of order was outraged. He couldn’t understand why so much fuss should be made about people condemned to death. Enraged, he stared out the window. “There they lie, like gypsies, with their rags and tatters in front of the gates! Are we in the Balkans or in Germany? Can you figure out what’s going on, Weber?”

Weber was unmoved. “Some authority must have given the orders,” he said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have come up here.”

“That’s just what I mean! Some official down there at the railroad station. Without my having been consulted. Not even informed beforehand. Not to mention the complete lack of organization. That simply doesn’t seem to exist any more! Every day new authorities turn up. Those down at the railroad station maintain that the people screamed too much. That it was making a bad impression on the civilian population. What’s that got to do with us? Our people don’t scream.”

He glanced at Weber. Weber was leaning indolently against the door. “Have you talked to Dietz about it yet?” he asked.

“No, not yet. You’re right. I’ll do it at once.”

Neubauer had the call put through and spoke for some time. Then he put down the receiver. He had grown calmer. “Dietz says we’re to keep them only overnight. The whole lot in one block. Not to distribute them through the barracks. Not to admit them officially. Just leave them here and guard them. Tomorrow they’ll be sent on. By then the railroad will be repaired.” He gazed out of the window. “But where shall we put them? We’re overcrowded already.”

“We can leave them on the roll-call ground.”

“We need the roll-call ground tomorrow morning for the working gangs. That’ll only create confusion. Besides, those Balkans will make a complete mess of it. We can’t have that.”

“We can put them on the roll-call ground in front of the Small camp. There they won’t be much in the way.”

“Is there enough room?”

“Yes. Then we’ll just have to pack all our own people into the barracks. Lately a number of them have been sleeping out.”

“Why? Are the barracks that overcrowded?”

“That depends on how one looks at it. People can be packed like sardines. Even on top of one another.”

“It’ll have to be done for one night.”

“It shall be done. None of the people in the Small camp will care to get mixed up with the transport crowd.” Weber grinned. “They’ll shrink from that as from the plague.”

A fleeting grin passed over Neubauer’s face. It pleased him to hear that his prisoners preferred to stay in the camp. “We must post guards,” he said. “Otherwise the new ones will disappear into the barracks. Then there’ll be a real mess.”

Weber shook his head. “The people in the barracks will be on their guard against that, too. They’re afraid enough as it is that we’ll send some of them along to make up the quota.”

“All right. Appoint a few of our men and enough kapos and camp police as guards. And have the barracks in the Small camp locked up. We can’t risk using any searchlights to keep a watch on the transport.”

It looked as though a vast horde of great tired birds no longer able to fly were approaching through the twilight. They swayed and stumbled, and when one fell the others trampled over him almost without looking, until those who followed picked him up.

“Barrack doors closed!” commanded the SS squad leader who was locking up the Small camp. “Stay inside! Anyone coming out will be shot!”

The crowd was driven onto the ground between the barracks. It surged to and fro. Some fell, others crouched beside them, forming in the turmoil an island which kept on growing bigger, and soon all were lying on the ground and the evening fell on them like a rain of ashes.

They lay and slept; but their voices were not silent. They kept on fluttering up out of dreams and anguished sleep and sudden awakening, foreign and shrill, and sometimes they joined into a long-drawn wail which rose and fell with the same few sounds and surged against the barracks like a sea of misery against the safe arks of security.

In the barracks they heard it all through the night. It tore at the nerves, and even during the first hours men began to grow wild. They started screaming, and when the crowd outside heard it their wailing also rose and this in turn increased the screaming within. It was like a sinister, medieval, alternating lamentation—until revolver butts thundered against barrack doors, shots resounded and the hollow thump of truncheons could be heard as they fell on bodies, then the sharper sounds as they fell on skulls.

Then it grew calmer. The screaming men in the barracks had been overwhelmed by their comrades; and the crowd outside had been overcome by the sleep of exhaustion rather than by the truncheons. They hardly felt the truncheons any longer. Off and on the lamentation rose again; it grew weaker but never died down entirely.

The Veterans listened for a long time. They listened and shuddered and feared they might be going to share the same fate. In appearance they differed little from the transport people outside—but they felt sheltered in their death barracks, between stench and death, packed together and on top of each other, under the hieroglyphs scratched into the walls by the dying, and in their agony at not being able to go to the latrine—they felt as sheltered as though
these barracks were home and security against the strange, boundless suffering outside—and this seemed almost more horrifying than many things they had gone through before.

They were awakened in the morning by many low, foreign voices. It was still dark. The wailing had ceased. Instead, there now came a scratching on the barrack walls. It scratched as though hundreds of rats outside were gnawing to get in. It scratched secretly and not very loud, and then there began a cautious knocking against the door, against the walls, and then a murmuring, low, almost fawning, beseeching, in a foreign singsong, in the broken voices of last despair; they were begging to be admitted.

They were imploring those in the Ark for help against the Flood. They were quieter, already resigned, they no longer screamed; they just begged, they caressed the wood of the walls, they lay in front of the doors and scratched with hands and nails and implored with soft, dim voices in the darkness.

“What are they saying?” asked Bucher.

“They’re pleading to be let in in the name of their mothers. In the name of—” Ahasver broke off. He was weeping.

“We can’t do it,” said Berger.

“Yes, I know.”

An hour later came the order to march on. Outside, commands were being shouted. In answer there came a loud wailing, followed by more commands, loud and furious.

“Can you see anything, Bucher?” asked Berger. They were crouching on a top bunk in front of the small window.

“Yes. They’re refusing. They don’t want to go.”

“Get up!” shouted someone outside. “Fall in! Fall in line and number!”

The Jews didn’t get up. They remained flat on the ground and
glanced with terror-filled eyes at the guards and hid their heads in their arms.

“Get up!” roared Handke. “Up with you! Up, you stinkers! Or shall we give you some encouragement? Get out of here!”

The encouragement had no effect. The five hundred creatures who, because they worshiped God in other ways than their tormentors, had been reduced to something that could no longer be described as human, reacted no more to screams, curses and beatings. They remained prone, they tried to hug the ground, they clawed themselves into it—the wretched, filthy earth of the concentration camp appeared to them most desirable, it was for them paradise and salvation. They knew where they were going to be taken. As long as they had been on the transport and in motion they had apathetically kept on moving. Now, having once stopped and come to rest, they refused as apathetically to move again.

The guards grew bewildered. They had been given orders not to beat the people to death, and this was rather difficult. The command had no other reason than the usual bureaucratic one; the transport had not been assigned to the camp and consequently had to leave it as complete as possible.

More SS-men appeared. From the window of Barrack 20, 509 saw Weber arrive in his shiny elegant boots. He stopped at the entrance to the Small camp and gave an order. The SS raised their rifles and fired close over the bodies lying on the ground. Legs apart, hands on hips, Weber stood near the gate. After the salvos he had expected the Jews to leap up.

They didn’t. They were beyond all threats. They wanted to stay where they were. They didn’t want to move. Even had they been fired upon, they probably wouldn’t have stirred.

Weber’s face changed color. “Get them up!” he shouted. “Beat them till they get up! Beat their legs and feet!”

The guards threw themselves upon the crowd. They beat them
with truncheons and fists, they trampled on their stomachs and genitals, they tore at the people by their hair and beards and pulled them onto their feet; but the people let themselves drop again as though they had no bones.

Bucher stared out. “Just look at that,” whispered Berger. “It’s not only the SS who are doing the beating up. Not only green ones, either. Not only criminals. There are other colors among them. Some of our men are there, too! Prisoners like ourselves turned kapos and cops. They’re behaving just like their masters.” He rubbed his inflamed eyes as though he wanted to squeeze them out of his head. Close beside the barrack stood an old man with a white beard. Blood poured from his mouth and slowly reddened his beard.

“Come away from the window,” said Ahasver. “If they see you, they’ll take you, too.”

“They can’t see us.”

The window was grimy and dim and from outside no one could see what was going on behind it in the dark room. From the inside, on the other hand, one could see enough.

“You oughtn’t to watch that,” said Ahasver. “It’s a sin unless you’re forced to.”

“It’s no sin,” said Bucher. “We don’t want ever to forget this, that’s why we’re watching it.”

“Haven’t you seen enough of it here in the camp?”

Bucher didn’t answer. He was staring out of the window.

Gradually the frenzy outside began to exhaust itself. The guards would have had to drag each one away singly. For that they would have needed a thousand men. Sometimes they managed to get ten or twenty Jews together out onto the road; but not more. As soon as there were more they broke through the men guarding them and dashed back again to the large twitching mass.

“There’s Neubauer himself,” said Berger.

He had suddenly appeared and was talking to Weber. “They don’t want to leave,” said Weber, less unperturbed than before. “One could practically beat them to death and still they wouldn’t move.”

Neubauer blew out dense clouds of cigar smoke. The stench was very high. “Horrible story! Why on earth were they sent here? They could so easily have been finished off where they were, instead of having them sent all over the country to be gassed. I’d like to know the reason for this.”

“The reason is that even the filthiest Jew has a body. Five hundred corpses are five hundred corpses. Killing is simple; but it’s far more difficult to make corpses disappear. And these were two thousand.”

“Nonsense! Nearly every camp has a crematorium like ours.”

“That’s true. But for these times crematoriums work far too slow. Especially if the camp has to be cleared in a hurry.”

Neubauer spat out a piece of tobacco leaf. “All the same I don’t understand why the people have to be shipped about all over the place.”

“That again is a question of corpses.” Weber had recovered his calm. “Our authorities don’t like the idea of too many bodies being found. So far only crematoriums have been able to dispose of them in such a way that their number cannot afterwards be established. Unfortunately, for our enormous requirements, they work much too slowly. We’ve still no really effective means of quickly disposing of large crowds. Mass graves can be opened long afterwards, allowing atrocity stories to be invented. One has seen this in Poland and Russia.”