Sunrise West (4 page)

‘Chaff will wither,' said Rudolf, throwing back one of his mad lines. He took me aside. ‘Look, friend, you're not going to last at this rate. You have no number on your arm, which means that you're just being kept in stock. As soon as there's a shortage of fuel to keep the furnaces going, you'll be it.

‘I've heard a rumour,' he persisted, dropping his voice. ‘Tomorrow a delegation will be arriving at the camp. They'll be looking for slave-labour.' He handed me a red lipstick. ‘Make sure you're looking good.'

After evening roll-call we were all transferred back to Block 5, and the following noon, under the gaze of three well-fed merchants, we stood in front of the barrack completely naked, staring at these gods of life and death. The whole proceeding lasted an hour, and was uncannily reminiscent of scenes I could recall from
Uncle Tom's Cabin
.

Raymond and I were among the ones chosen. I distinctly heard Romek mutter (I didn't imagine it), ‘Good luck, boys!' Soon curfew was imposed; after curfew, contact with any other inmates outside the barrack meant death. Even so, Rudolf managed to get in, and when we embraced he squeezed a silver-plated spoon into my hand. ‘Have it for luck,' he said. ‘It still carries the aroma of my Jewish grandmother's cooking. It's a very fortunate old silver spoon.'

He pointed to a tiny inscription engraved on the spoon. ‘
Promise and Exile
,' he whispered, pronouncing the message with passion. Then, like a fading vision, he slowly retreated into a crevice in the barrack wall, to merge into the grim ether of Birkenau's night.

 

 
The Library of Imagination
 

Raymond and I were among the 180 lucky slaves sold or donated by the camp authorities to a German roadmaking company.

I clearly remember that sunny autumn morning of our departure from Auschwitz-Birkenau — sixty slaves to a wagon, and at the end of each wagon a concealed steel enclosure that aroused our suspicions. How did we know that this wasn't a gas container, some of us argued. ‘They're not to be trusted,' Raymond muttered. ‘We shouldn't forget for even one moment that this world is governed by a gang of criminals with a criminal ideology, inventors of novel methods of murder.' He went over to investigate but returned with a smile: the enclosure turned out to be a toilet.

We travelled for hours deep into the heart of a mountainous terrain. The wagon's huge shutters were wide open, our young German guard sat on a chair (the only chair) looking bored, leaning on his gun. As the day aged, an unwelcome chilly white fog enveloped the train: ‘We've run in such panic from the advancing Russians,' the guard complained (what music to our ears!), ‘that I didn't even have time to pick up my winter coat. I'll never forgive them that.'

The train moved at a soothing pace, passing through a panorama of forests, fields and well-cultivated orchards. How oblivious, I thought, was this beautiful landscape to war, to human pain. Perhaps it was the momentary tranquillity which made me mention something about my mother's incurable love for nature. Raymond cautioned me. ‘Don't, friend! Don't even try to think of the past. You can
cry later, much later. Start now, and soon there'll be one voice less to testify to what we've witnessed.'

‘What do you reckon about Rudolf?' I asked. ‘And how do you understand the inscription on the spoon he gave me?
Promise and Exile
.'

‘I don't know,' he replied. ‘There's something strange about that young fellow. I can't really work him out, his brashness in the face of danger. But the engraving on the spoon — it has a definite biblical echo.'

Raymond adjusted his position (we were lying on the floor). ‘I read a story somewhere about Moses,' he went on. ‘When his people, whom he had led out of Egypt, chose religion over God and made a golden calf, the Almighty was angry and wanted to destroy these idol-worshippers — but Moses interceded on their behalf, so God spared them and made of Moses a great and powerful nation. Its inhabitants are reputed to have dwelt beyond the river Sabatyon, so called because on weekdays it flowed with a furious current, but on the Sabbath it came to a standstill. And there, as the story goes, Moses instructed one of his poet-architects to build the Library of Imagination.'

Raymond smiled mysteriously, as if he had forgotten the purpose of our journey. He was clearly enjoying his tale.

‘The library had a vaulted roof of blue ivory, and was lined with massive shelves. Every book was bound in black leather, with pure gold emblazoned on its spine. And one of these books contained a startling revelation. The calf had not been the Chosen People's first act of defiance against their Master, for there had once occurred a far more sinister
rebellion. You see, Adam was expelled from Paradise not for eating the apple, but for tipping off the Jews about what lay in store for them! Because of this, the Jews refused to be created. God was beside Himself — to whom would he now entrust His holy Torah?

‘He was forced to offer a stupendous promise, which the Jews gullibly accepted. How were they to know that at the heart of this promise lay an everlasting exile?'

 

 
The Potemkin Affair
 

The train stopped at a small station. Dressed in our striped prisoners' uniforms and surrounded by a squad of armed soldiers, we were marched three abreast through the main street of the township. The sergeant in charge kept warning passers-by to ‘stay away from these typhus-infested criminals'.

It was almost dusk. Men in tweed coats, their eyes turned inwards, kept rushing past, presumably on their way home from work. Young women with small fair-headed children gazed at us in bewilderment from curtained windows. Chimney smoke above the terracotta roofs carried the aroma of delicious cooking.

‘A Potemkin scene,' I said to Raymond. ‘It's all a lie, it cannot be.' Grigori Potemkin was a Russian field-marshal with a legendary reputation for creating illusions. It was said that he had fake villages constructed to fool his empress, Catherine the Great, on her tour of the Crimea in 1787.

‘No,' answered Raymond, ‘what you see is not a mirage. It's just that our enemy has succeeded in making us forget the peacefulness of normal family existence.'

The camp lay on the very outskirts of the township. We were welcomed by a group of Jewish men; these were the block-eldest. ‘Have no fear, boys,' they told us, ‘you've arrived in Jerusalem.' And to our amazement, after hot thick soup and a slice of corn-bread we were shown to our bunks — which were covered with real blankets! Raymond took the bunk above mine and I heard him drop heavily onto his straw sack.

Our
Lagerführer
was a tall, imposing man in his midfifties who walked about the camp with a smile on his face. And although it can be hard to assess the character of an incessantly smiling person, we believed that this German, who spoke to us with effortless ease, was a genuine human being.

At morning roll-call, when we were counted, he announced that fifteen youngsters who had travelled with us, after somehow miraculously managing to escape death selection at Auschwitz, had permission to enter the kitchen whenever they were hungry. Raymond took a great interest in this young group; perhaps the teacher in him had been awoken again. On one occasion I overheard him summon his last drop of optimism as he told one of them: ‘The war will soon be over. Remember, not all Germans are evil. Hold on to your humanity at all cost.'

I still recall the strange foreboding aura of that bright Friday afternoon in October when the open army truck rolled confidently into our camp to collect its silent harvest.
It took only a few minutes for the fifteen youngsters to be loaded aboard — for the journey back to Birkenau and the fate Germany had bestowed upon them.

Soon afterwards we had to leave our Jerusalem. There were no clouds of the Lord resting on us by day, and no fiery columns by night, as we were marched on a muddy track towards a new Egypt. For a long stretch of time we walked enveloped in muteness. At last Raymond spoke.

‘Men who have spent years in captivity can be surprisingly gullible,' he remarked, ‘yet at the same time tremendously suspicious. But I dare to hope, if only for God's sake,' said this incurable mocker of religion, ‘that our
Lagerführer
had nothing to do with sending those kids back to Auschwitz. And that his perpetual smile was a genuine reflection of his nature, not just a well-rehearsed Potemkin production.'

 

 
Wolfsburg