Sunrise West (3 page)

If not for the night, one would not see the stars.

László Steiner was a respected doctor from Budapest, a quiet man of about forty who kept to himself. In all likelihood, his name would appear only on the pages of oblivion if not for his selfless deed. One day, as we lined up to receive our soup, with the Hungarians as usual at the head of the queue, Dr Steiner unexpectedly stepped out of the line. ‘Brothers,' he declared, raising his right hand, ‘would it not be just, if only for once, to give priority to the Polish Jews?'

A wink from the
Blockälteste
sent Rysiek's fist into László's abdomen. The doctor fell like an empty sack and the ladling went on undisturbed. After the evening roll-call Raymond and I carried László to his bunk. Miraculously he made it through the night, but as the first splinter of grey pierced the dusty barrack pane I heard his heavy breathing dwindle to a final, drawn-out sigh.

 

 
Day of Atonement
 

That year, 1944, Yom Kippur fell on a Wednesday in late September. I remember the oppressive sunset that preceded the Day of Atonement after we were herded into the
barrack at 4 p.m., and the glimmer of the sickly lightbulb gazing suspiciously over the shadowy murmur of despairing hands.

‘Drop down wherever you're standing, and freeze!' our block-eldest had shouted. We obeyed. No sooner had he left than the barrack was filled with a voiceless questioning and the sound of sobbing. Shortly a figure stood up in the near-darkness and moved its arms about its head and shoulders in an eerie pantomime — the figure was robing itself in an imaginary prayer-shawl. It sat down again, then whispered: ‘
Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who hast sanctified us with Thy commandments, and commanded us to enwrap ourselves in the fringed garment.'

‘Yes,' said Raymond, quite audibly. ‘Doesn't our Almighty know that at this very moment our holy robes are swaddling the shitty bottoms of thousands of Christian infants?'

‘You're being un-Jewish, Jew, it's Yom Kippur,' an inmate muttered angrily under his breath. Raymond said no more.

After a moment, a subdued prayer came from where the shadowy figure was sitting: ‘
Al daas hamokom ve al daas ha-kohol, biyeshivoh shel ma'loh, uviyeshivoh shel matoh
...
With the sanction of the Omnipresent and with the sanction of the congregation, by the authority of the heavenly tribunal and by the authority of the earthly tribunal, we hereby grant permission to pray with those who have transgressed.'

Then the figure began to chant the
Kol Nidre
.

I glanced over at Raymond, noticed the quiver on his thin white lips. There were tears in his eyes.

The SS
Blockführer
leapt into the barrack like a man who has taken leave of his senses. ‘
Sau Juden
! Unthankful
swine!' he screamed. ‘I ordered you to freeze, yet you're chanting your black-magic chants. You, the rotten soloist, whoever you are — come forward at once. If not,
all
of you are doomed!'

The tension lasted only a second or two. Then, as if from a cloud, a dim phantom of a man arose — the shadowy figure that had been leading our spontaneous service. Although I couldn't see his face, I had recognized him by his voice: it was Laibl, the pious cantor from the cobblers' synagogue in my city of the waterless river. Rysiek, who was always at the side of his superior, only had to hit Laibl once. Giggling to himself, he picked up the heavy-duty hose that was attached to our barrack tap and turned it on.

All that night we lay on the cold cement floor in a pool of water, as we'd been ordered to do. At the ominous sound of the 4.30 gong we got up and rushed out to be counted, before being forced to endure a half-hour of rapid squatting and standing.

A crispy calcium air hovered about the camp on that Yom Kippur morning. After a night of lying in freezing water, two men seeking a shred of warmth found each other's back. Soon others did likewise, and before long a broad cluster of stalks — a strange human sheaf — stood in the space between barrack and barrack, and a little apart from the rest of us. As the warmth seeped through these prisoners' bones, the sheaf began to murmur a Yiddish tune, its words penned by the poet Avraham Reisen:

Dance, rejoice, crazy winds,

This is your golden time;

Long will this cruel winter last,

And your heinous crime.

Rend the shutters from the windows,

Smash the windowpanes;

Somewhere a candle flickers dimly,

Snuff it without shame.

Drive the birds from the forests,

Scatter them with wrath;

Those who cannot fly the distance

Murder on the spot.

The camp authorities quickly got wind of this dangerous rebellion and within no time the whole assembly was surrounded by a ring of bludgeon-wielding
kapos
. The offending group, the human sheaf, was marched off, never to be seen again.

An eerie silence enfolded the barrack as our
Blockführer
, who before turning criminal had allegedly studied Roman history, stomped in. He was drunk.

‘I must know the meaning of that song,' he announced. ‘The one sung yesterday by those Jews who are now facing their Maker... Hey you!' he shrilled at a man who stood out a little from the crowd, ‘tell us what message your song carried.'

‘Sadness, Herr
Blockführer
, only sadness.'

A deft punch from Rysiek felled the man. The historian stood with one foot on his body, like a victor of old. ‘
Sau Juden
! Not the Visigoths, not the Vandals,' he fumed, ‘but
your contagious
sadness
— your
Jüdischer Demut
— was what destroyed the Roman Empire. Well, that will not work with us, it will not work with us!' And he stood back, as if to deliver a soliloquy.

‘Your God promised to make your offspring as numerous as the dust of the earth,' he declared, now citing Genesis, ‘so that if one could count the dust of the earth, thus would your offspring too be counted. But we have proved that your God was only partly correct. You are dust, yes, but remember — we will count you and count you, until there is nothing left of you to be counted!'

 

 
Rudolf's Silver Spoon
 

O simple spoon, your greatness can be valued only by a man who has been forced to sup like a dog from one plate with four other starved men.

A few weeks before the Jews from the city of the waterless river were brought to Birkenau, the Germans, to the lively strains of the camp orchestra, exterminated thousands of gypsies in a single night. A youngster from Frankfurt am Main, a denizen of the
Lager
since its inception and known as Rudolf the Mad, dubbed the event ‘Johann Strauss's Waltz of Death':

‘
Ein Zwei Drei, Ein Zwei Drei,

Dear Lady Death, come another day.

There is no escape from your eager hand,

For this is Germany's nightmare land.'

Rudolf, who on account of his beautiful Aryan mother had reputedly (as the bitter jokesters had it) been driven to camp in a Mercedes limousine, could not push that killing spree from his mind. ‘Not only can I still smell the gypsies' sweat from the crematorium chimney,' he would tell us, ‘but I can hear their sad melodies in the buzz of the electric fence.'

One day he said to me, ‘You know, the authorities wanted to certify me, but my uncle Kurt, who was high up in the SS, argued that I was too crazy to be locked up!'

Encouraged by my chuckle, he continued in a more serious vein: ‘I'll never forget the morning the Gestapo arrested my father, who was a professor of sociology and a member of the Spartacus party — a Jew, yet more German than Bismarck. They apprehended him for composing an innocent little ditty:

Everything is transient

All things pass away,

First goes the Führer

Then his big lie.

‘They said to my mother, who loved him dearly, “We're taking him away to be re-educated, he'll be back soon.” Three months later we received father's death certificate, and his clothes. The messenger wouldn't hand over the tiny urn with his ashes until mother agreed to share a schnapps with him. “Well,” he told her, clearly a cultured man, “did Priam not succumb to Achilles' request that he should eat and rest before taking away the body of his slain son, Hector?”'

Despite Raymond's reservations, I was fond of Rudolf — though his sayings were so dangerously outlandish that they placed not only him but his listener in jeopardy. ‘
Meine Herren
, noble slaves,' he announced on one occasion, ‘no ruler can reign without the approval, or at least the acquiescence, of the people!' No wonder they called him mad.

Perhaps again by virtue of his beautiful mother, and probably of his uncle Kurt's position in the service, Rudolf was admitted into the coveted ‘Canada' block of the camp, so called presumably because, in a place where gas chambers were a way of life, where people died
en masse
from hunger, those in ‘Canada' — who collected the possessions of all new arrivals, and worked in the gas chambers and crematoria — lacked few necessities. After a while, though, no doubt because they had seen and knew too much, most of them were also included in the Final Solution.

Thanks to Rudolf, I became a frequent visitor to Block 1, that barrack of Birkenau's privileged. One day I met two Frenchmen there who offered me a loaf of bread if I could provide them with a blanket from among those consigned the night before to the inmates of Block 8 (blankets being one necessity ‘Canada' was short of). Next morning I stealthily brought the merchandise; to avoid suspicion I pretended to be dusting it. But when Rudolf saw me making the exchange he jumped at the two fellows.

‘Murderers, thieves, ill-begotten scum!' he cursed them. ‘Do you know what you have done? He could have been hanged for that!'

‘But he wasn't, was he!' they retorted cynically. ‘And who are you to judge us, Crazy Man?'