The Fighter (10 page)

Little Rosenberg raises his arms and laughs, as if he had knocked out the world champ. The kapos and foremen pat him on the back and compliment him, as if to say, “Good job! You passed your exam with flying colors. Welcome to our side!”

He is a poor twenty-year-old kid. He doesn't understand what's at stake. We feel sorry for him. Yeah, but now we can't trust him anymore. A few days later, he becomes an assistant deputy, Laybich's helper and a patent killer.

If I stay in the digging kommando, I'll soon be too weak to escape death. Now that I've regained my will to live, I know how to proceed if I want to hold on until tomorrow, until next week. Health and willpower aren't enough. I have to look around, be on the alert, foresee what may happen. For instance, our masters hit us with their clubs from morning to night. I have to guess when blows are about to rain down, then try to run and dodge. I'm lucky. Boxing made me tough. I can take more punishment than my comrades. Even if I don't weaken as fast as they do, a day will come when I can't run anymore and I'll end up in block seven.

I forgot the most important thing: health, willpower, and alertness are useless if you don't have luck, lots of luck.

One morning, as I'm preparing to leave with my digging kommando, I hear a familiar voice.

“Hey, aren't you Wisniak?”

“Prager! I'm not sure I would have recognized you if you hadn't called me. You're wearing an armband! Foreman!”

“I am an electrical engineer. Remember?”

“I remember we used to swim together in the Marne. I thought you were a doctor.”

“I do electricity work here.”

“Listen, can I join your kommando?”

“Sneak into the line, quick. I'll tell the kapo you've studied electricity.”

When we left France, we thought the Germans were taking us to a work camp. The sentence
Arbeit macht frei,
over the gate, seemed to confirm our assumption. We soon discovered it was just a big joke. They don't really want the Jews to be productive, otherwise why would they kill us as soon as we become good at a certain task? In most kommandos, actually, we have jobs that don't require much skill: moving stones, digging holes. The real workers are the kapos and foremen who produce corpses. While I decided to follow the electricians on a whim, I soon find out that this is my lucky break. In this kommando, the word
work
means exactly the same thing as in the real world that exists outside this hell. Prager is a real foreman, who doesn't kill anyone. The kapo, a German political prisoner, tries to keep his men alive because he needs their knowledge. What worries me at first is exactly how little I know about electricity. Sure, I installed it in our apartment in
Paris, but it's not the same thing as being a trained electrician. Actually, the trained electricians in the kommando need strong assistants to carry huge rolls of barbed wire and heavy tools. We are building a fence for a new camp where they'll keep Gypsy families.

Since our work helps the Germans, the kapo and Prager think we shouldn't be overzealous. We screw in china insulators, then unscrew them and screw them in again. The SS who oversees us from his watchtower doesn't notice anything. His only goal is to kill Jews.

Prager warns me.

“When he sees a new guy, he throws a cigarette beyond the barbed wire. ‘For you, if you can pick it up!' he shouts. The comrade reaches across with his hand, bends down, slips his head between two wires. Then the SS puts a bullet into his skull. ‘He attempted to escape!' he shouts. ‘He attempted to escape!' He laughs at his clever trick. Do you see what's funny?”

“We're building a fence that's still unfinished, but if we step on the other side, we're attempting to escape, is that it?”

“Yes. Then I've seen him climb down from his tower to check whether he hit the center of his target.”

The SS has had enough of this game. On my second day with the kommando, he tries a more ordinary one. He throws cigarettes on our side of the fence.

“These are for whoever will box!”

Instead of killing us himself, he hopes one of us will kill another. Why would we do such a stupid thing? For a few cigarettes? We rejoice that we've found a good kommando. We're not going to risk our lives for a handful of smokes.

Ha, but wait! Two guys I remember from Pithiviers (Czech Jews, I think) come forward, ready to fight to the death. Both of them box well, but one of them, who is taller, lands most of his punches. The smaller one howls with pain, stoops, and puts a knee to the ground. I watch from a distance while I work. In the meantime, the SS leaves us alone. After an hour or so, I see that the tall one has knocked out the small one. Is he dead—or only wounded and ready for block seven? He lies on the ground until the end of our workday. Two prisoners carry him away.

We've walked half a mile on our way back to the camp. Now that the watchtower guard can't see us anymore, the dead man stands up suddenly and laughs! We laugh, too, and applaud. Everybody thought the Czech Jews were fighting for real. These guys are real pros.

Our kapo is angry. He addresses the smaller man: “You, if you come back here tomorrow, the guard will recognize you. He'll know that we tricked him and he will kill us all.”

“All right. I'll go with another kommando.”

If he goes, we need someone to replace him. I talk about it to Brod.

“They don't kill us. They don't even hit us.”

“I'm a tailor. My father was a tailor, and his father was a tailor. What do I know about electricity? As soon as I touch electric wires, sparks begin to fly everywhere. Oil lamps were good enough for me, I tell you.”

“You'll only have to carry the wires. Come on!”

He joins our kommando the next morning.

About ten days later, they line us up for an inspection. An SS examines us, then picks out seven men. I have a feeling he's looking for people who're still in fairly good shape. He selects me, as well as Brod. He doesn't ask us whether we're trained electricians.

We make up a small kommando, with no kapo to second our SS. He leads us to a camp annex, beyond the gate. Something is fishy. The SS doesn't shout, doesn't scold us for walking too slowly, doesn't call us shitbags. He explains, as if he were talking to friends, that we'll be able to eat, drink, and even smoke. And that after one week, our situation will improve yet again. We'll be able to wash and we'll receive new clothes. Next we expect he'll offer us women. Fishy and scary.

We reach our new workplace around noon. We discover two large rectangles, some sixty yards long by thirty yards wide, delimited by a furrow in the ground. Three poles with floodlights stand in the center and at the ends of the first rectangle. We're to dig them up and drive them back into the ground so as to light the other rectangle. One of us, a real electrician, ties special hooks on his hands and feet
so he can climb to the top of the poles and remove the wiring.

We notice that the ground seems damp in places. We move toward the poles. Our feet sink into the mud. We wade in a red liquid. Blood!

The SS stays far away from us, more than forty yards. Maybe he doesn't want to soil his shiny black boots. Or he is scared. Seeing death face-to-face every day has toughened us, but we are scared, too. This is not an ordinary fear, but a kind of deep terror that paralyzes and silences us.

We move the poles and install the floodlights. This is easy work. It is over after two or three hours.

“See that shed?” the SS asks. “That's where you eat. Then you stay there. You don't look outside. Do you understand?”

We spend the rest of the day in the shed without doing or saying anything. I just exchange a few whispers with Brod.

“There are bodies.”

“Hundreds. Did you see the size of the rectangles?”

“You could say thousands.”

“The comrades who raised the poles… they're down there.”

“We're next. They'll throw us in.”

On the morning of the second day, we arrive much earlier. We find out that a kommando came during the night and excavated the second rectangle. It now resembles a three-foot-deep swimming pool bordered by mounds of
earth. They lock us up in the shed right away, so we can't see whether there's anything in the swimming pool.

Yesterday, the SS said we shouldn't look outside the shed, but he doesn't say anything today. I guess it doesn't really matter, since we're going to die anyway.

All the prisoners know that the Germans murder old people and mothers with their children. We heard about gas as soon as we entered the camp, but we didn't know how the executioners actually proceeded. So here it is. From our shed window, we watch—as a feeling of dread tears our hearts—the grim spectacle of the Jews' extermination. We can see several small houses in the distance. We hadn't even noticed them on the first day, but the nearest one is quite visible. Two groups of naked Jews are walking toward this house. On one side, old men and boys. On the other side, women, girls, and babies. Twenty people altogether. I find it odd that they don't look worried. Four men dressed in white and two SS flank them. The Jews enter the small house. The SS close the door. An SS brings in a container that looks like a can of paint. We hear the muffled noise of a trapdoor closing. Then we perceive shreds of screams, carried by the wind's uneven breath. Brod, who has had a religious education, says he recognizes the prayer
Shema Israel:
“Hear, O Israel—the Eternal is our Lord, the Eternal is One.”

The men in white live separately, in their own camp, but everybody has heard about them. They belong to the
Sonderkommando
(the special kommando). They live in comfort, they eat as much as they want, they are gassed after three months. The SS promised us new clothes at the end of the week. They're white clothes.

While the Jews are dying in the small house, teams of men in white are laying rails between the house and the pit. Then they bring small flatcars, simple platforms on wheels, to the house's door. Breathing through a mask, they enter the house, load the bodies on the flatcars, and throw them into the pit. When it's over, they cover them with earth. In the meantime, huge fans, which roar like airplane engines, clear the gas. Thus, the next group of Jews will approach the house without noticing any foul smell.

The earth rectangle now looks just like yesterday's. We come out of the shed and move the poles and the floodlights to the next rectangle. Then we eat and spend the rest of the afternoon in silent meditation.

I remember a Greek Jew telling me about his kommando. They dug a huge pit every night. Nobody knew why. There were at least two hundred men. It took no time at all.

I guess this kommando digs at the beginning of the night. They start gassing the Jews before dawn. When we arrived, the pit was probably quite full already. We saw the gassing of the last group. The mothers, the kids. I would prefer them to shout and cry. The Sonderkommando men always remove the rails and flatcars before a new group is brought to the house. Thus, they can't guess what it is all
about. They don't tell them they'll be poisoned with gas. I wonder what they do tell them. That the small house is a dining hall where they'll eat. Naked? No, it doesn't make sense. They had us undress when we arrived, so they could shave us. They disinfected us with a powder against lice. Yes, this is more likely: “You'll take a hot shower and then we'll disinfect you.” So the people undress. Why do they need them to be naked? They want the clothes, that's why. When I worked in the Kleidenkammer, I thought that the clothes came from the suitcases left in the train. Now I understand that there were also clothes from the dead.

On the third day, we see that several old men refuse to cross the threshold. Maybe they've guessed why they're being pushed, naked, into a small house with an armored door. The men in white take them to the side. When the others are in and the door is closed, the SS kill them with a bullet to the head. The SS never kill anyone in front of the women and children, lest it cause a panic.

On the fourth or fifth day, our SS ceases to lock us inside the shed. We can walk around freely. He wants us to become familiar with our future job. One of us even enters the gas chamber to change a lightbulb. He talks to the men in white and confirms my hypothesis.

“They promise them a hot shower and a meal. They say, ‘Hurry up and wash before the soup gets cold.'”

We gather near the small house when the men in white,
masks on, open the door and pull out the corpses. The naked bodies are so terribly entangled that they become one gigantic monster. We try not to think of the horrendous spasms that locked them in this manner. Wild, frightening grins distort the faces. The gelatinous globes of the eyes have jumped out of their sockets, the better to stare at us from the world of the dead. We hear sharp snaps and cracks: the men in white are breaking the bones to untangle the corpses before they carry them to the flatcars.

Most mothers grasp the neck of their child with clenched hands. They strangled their own kid to bring on a faster death. We mutter, “
Oy veh
,” a Yiddish cry that means, “Oh pain…”

We've seen thousands of corpses in Auschwitz. We're old numbers, all of us. We thought we had seen everything. Yet, on this day, we discover that there is no limit to human cruelty and pain. We know that we just crossed an invisible border. If we survive, we'll never be ordinary men again.

Many ancient myths tell of a character who sees terrible things or offends the gods, then becomes blind or turns into a statue. Will we lose our sight? Pierce our own eyes like Oedipus? We walk back to our shed without talking to each other. The next day, we do not go out, although the door stays open. We speak in whispers.