The Fighter (15 page)

During the year 1944, I work in the coal vein with Vitek. This man is different from the other Poles—he doesn't hate Jews. The mine's director wants us to extract twenty tons of coal every day. To reach this monstrous goal, we must become a strong team and avoid quarreling. If we don't learn to coordinate our moves, the conveyor belt that takes the coal away can snatch us and carry us to disaster. Vitek and I become real friends.

“I've worked with several prisoners,” he says. “They each held on a month or two before vanishing. I believe they're all dead. You've been here six months and you're still alive. How do you explain it?”

“At night, after the mine, I work in the kitchen, where I can eat a little more than the other guys.”

“I can't believe it! You work here on your knees for eight hours, then you've got enough strength left to begin another job!”

“All the prisoners must find something if they want to survive. In the camp, rest doesn't exist. The Germans think there are too many Jews. Every other week, they select the exhausted ones and send them to the gas chamber in Auschwitz.”

“Yes, I've heard about that. Other prisoners told me the same thing.”

In June, the camp secretary informs us that the Americans have landed in France, on the Normandy coast. On the other side of Europe, the Russians are reaching the Polish border. For the first time since I arrived in the camp two years ago, a feeling that resembles a glimmer of hope lights my heart. The Germans will be vanquished soon, no doubt. If only we could manage to survive until their defeat!

They send the most ferocious SS to the Eastern Front, which gets closer every day. To the German prisoners who wear the green triangle of common criminals—that is, the main kapos and block seniors—they offer freedom if they agree to enroll in the army. The remaining barons, Poles or Jews, treat us with a courtesy that increases every day. They look like wolves wearing a lambskin. A kapo who is probably preparing to escape forces me to give him my winter boots, which I had been able to keep all along. Now I wear canvas shoes with wooden soles.

Toward the end of the year, we stop going into the mine. The Russians have taken Warsaw. When the wind blows from the east, we hear a vague rumbling—the song
of their cannons. What will happen to us? The pessimists think the Germans will kill everybody before leaving. The optimists expect the Red Army to free us before the end of the week.

In January 1945, we learn that we'll neither be gassed nor liberated by the Russians, but “evacuated.” One morning, they give us each a blanket and a piece of bread. Every prisoner is also entitled to a dried sausage. The barons keep all the sausages, as if to stay in character until the bitter end. Standing in rows of five, we wait for hours in the cold. Brod and Gelber are with me.

Two SS go to the infirmary. “We advise you to come with the others,” they tell the patients. (I know this because Finkelstein, a comrade from my block who broke his leg when the conveyor belt caught him, told me about it after the war.)

Ever since we've been hearing the rumble of the Russian cannons, the SS and the barons seem to hesitate before committing their usual crimes. Still, Finkelstein and our other bedridden comrades distrust these murderers. The two SS seem to imply that staying would be a bad idea. “Is it a good old death threat?” Finkelstein wonders. He tries to stand up but can't. He doesn't have a choice: he must stay on his straw mat. “I've been very lucky so far,” he thinks. “If the SS hadn't grown soft suddenly, they would have cured my broken leg in the gas chamber….” (He stayed ten days in the infirmary; then the Germans vanished and the
Russians freed him. In the meantime, all the evacuated invalids died.)

We pass the camp gate in the middle of the afternoon. Daylight is already receding. We walk on a narrow road, toward an unknown destination. The barons have loaded their possessions and food supplies on long sleighs. As horses are scarce, ten prisoners pull each sleigh.

The narrow road merges into a larger one. A pitiful gray procession crawls along it. Thousands of men and women try to resist the frozen wind. I recognize the tired shuffle of the Auschwitz prisoners. We stop and wait several hours. I guess we're supposed to walk behind them. They seem to slow down. The barons and the healthier prisoners marched in front. What we see now, under the bleak winter twilight, is the desperate parade of the sick and Muselmen.

One hour or so after the last Auschwitz Muselman creeps away, they order us to move. We hear gunshots far ahead in front of us. Brod and Gelber rejoice.

“The Polish underground fighters are attacking the SS. We'll soon be free.”

“Or it might be the advance troops of the Red Army!”

These two poor guys are dreaming.

“Do you really think that the underground fighters or the Russian soldiers would shoot at SS in the dark? This would end up killing the prisoners. Besides, the SS would shoot back and we would hear machine guns.”

“So what do you make of it?”

“Do you think the SS…?”

“Of course. Listen to the shots: one at a time. They shoot the sick and the Muselmen whenever they stop walking.”

“We should see bodies on the road.”

“They push them to the sides. If there was any light, we would see them.”

After a while, we also hear shots behind us. Brod wants to know for sure, so he begins to slow down. One hour later, he catches up with us.

“As soon as a guy lags behind, they put a bullet into his head. Remmele, the commander, and other SS take care of it. They ride motorbikes with sidecars. They find the stragglers with their headlights.”

Russian war prisoners attack the Jews to steal their bread. Me, I ate my piece right away to be safe. The Jews resist; a fight begins in the dark. One of the motorbikes comes by. The SS shoot in the direction of the fight: three Russians killed and seven Jews.

Old German reservists, some of them more than sixty years old, guard our convoy—one soldier every thirty feet, under the supervision of the SS on their bikes. They walk, like us. At first, they carry heavy backpacks. Then they find it more convenient to use prisoners as mules. So here I am, bent under a huge bag, sinking to my knees into the snow. The white powder sticks under my wooden soles. I slip, I stumble, I'm finding it harder and harder to walk. I feel my
legs getting weaker. If I don't discover a way out of this mess, I'll drift to the back of the line and the SS will kill me. I step on something…. A backpack! Of course: I'll just throw my bag away. I've wrapped my head and shoulders in my blanket against the cold, so I can hope the old reservist who gave me the bag doesn't recognize me. He saw me briefly under the glare of his flashlight. All the prisoners look alike, with their striped pajamas and shaven heads. I must take this risk to survive. I explain my plan to Brod.

“Just walk behind me and empty the bag…. When it's flat, we'll remove it more easily and just let it slide to the ground.”

“All right.”

I hear a muffled but joyful scream:

“Look at this, Wisniak!”

He shows me two whole sausages, two hard-boiled eggs, and a loaf of bread! We share this bounty with Gelber and several other comrades. After less than a minute, not a single bread crumb is left to incriminate us.

They order us to sit in a circle in the middle of a field. So far, it has been very dark because we were walking in a forest of firs or pines. Now our tormentors can see us clearly, as the snow reflects the moonlight. The motorized SS start shouting and shooting at us.

“Is this what you call a circle, you pigs?”

“Hurry up!”

“See, you can move faster!”

I think our number has been halved since we left the camp. I am so tired that I fall asleep instantly, sitting on my folded blanket.

Gunfire wakes us up at dawn.

“Up, up, you shitheads! By fives!” the SS holler.

Many comrades, frozen stiff, fail to stand up. The SS and the barons slept in a farmhouse at the edge of the field. Forty or fifty prisoners hid in the farm's attic to escape from the cold. The SS shoot into the straw to dislodge them. A dozen or so get out alive.

The old reservists tell the SS that their bags full of food have vanished. The SS decide to search us before setting off. When they find a lump of sugar or a piece of bread in a comrade's pocket, they tell him to stand to the side with the prisoners who are too tired to walk.

“Trucks will come and pick you up,” they promise.

We never see any of them again, so we think the SS killed them. One third of the survivors disappear this way. We march all day. We pass through several villages. We see Poles watching us, hidden behind half-closed shutters. Brod is still looking for the underground fighters.

“I don't understand why they don't attack now. It is daytime.”

“They're glad the SS are taking us away. You remember Krzisztof, the kitchen kapo? One day, we had a talk about escaping from the camp. He told me the Jews were better off staying inside: ‘If you go out, the Polish underground
fighters will bump you off. They want to create a new Poland without any Jews.'”

As the night is falling again, we reach the city of Wodzislaw. We have walked twenty-five miles or so. A train of platform cars is waiting for us in the station. New SS guards, needing to warm up, welcome us with whips and clubs. I stay on my feet and climb up on a platform. Many comrades fall repeatedly and receive harsh blows. A familiar voice calls me. I recognize Gelber, although his face is puffed and bloody.

“They really beat you up, Wisniak!”

“Me? No. I don't think they did….”

“You're all black.”

“Oh. Yesterday I threw away a reservist's bag. I didn't want him to recognize me, so I rubbed mud all over my face.”

The train runs and puffs through the night. A thick layer of snow covers us and protects us from the cold. At dawn, we halt in a station called Buchenwald. The SS wake us up with the butts of their rifles. Some comrades refuse to wake up. The snow wasn't thick enough for them: they're as hard as stone statues.

The camp of Buchenwald is located in Germany, four hundred miles west of Auschwitz. A surprise awaits our barons: they lose their privileges. While we're standing on line for our first soup, one of them tries to overtake us. A Buchenwald deputy stops him:

“What do you want?”

“I am German.”

“So what?”

“I am German and they're Jews.”

“Here, you're nothing.”

The deputy gives him a couple of sharp slaps, then sends him to the end of the line. Here, everybody receives the same allotment of soup. Later on, a Buchenwald prisoner tells us what happened in this camp.

“There was a kind of civil war. Political prisoners, mostly communists from Germany and other countries,
have supplanted the German criminals who held the power positions at first. The SS went along with the change because the politicals could organize the camp better than the criminals. The Germans want their slaves to be as productive as possible.”

What a pity: we can't stay in this paradise. It seems we're needed in another camp. After a very short night, they order us lined up by fives. I try to hide under a bed at the end of the block, but they find me and I hit the road with my comrades. The Buchenwald prisoners told us that the American army entered Germany. The great Reich that was supposed to last one thousand years is seeing its last days. This doesn't stop the SS from shooting the laggards as they did on the road from Auschwitz. We walk thirty miles toward the south, which means hundreds of comrades die on the road.

We enter the camp of Ohrdruf at dinnertime. They lead us to an annex of the camp called Krähwinkel. We miss Buchenwald. Here, the barons are criminals. They serve a watery soup in dirty cans that remind us of the Auschwitz chamber pots.

They tell us we'll be digging galleries in the mountain with German workers. I hope we'll be able to work together as well as we did with the Polish miners.

I sleep in a concrete blockhouse, for some reason the only Jew in the middle of one hundred Russian war prisoners. They push me to a corner, far from the single window, so that I have a hard time breathing.

“You shouldn't complain,” they say. “Your friends are sleeping outside in the mud.”

I only spend a few hours in this concrete box anyway. We leave before dawn; we travel by train for several hours to reach our work site. They carry us in tipcarts similar to the mine's “tubs.” Triangular buckets are not a comfortable way to travel, especially when you put fifteen men in them. We're squeezed so tight that each of us can stand on only one foot. Some comrades scream with pain when cramps contract the ghostly muscles that stick to their legs.

We dig an underground factory. The Nazis want to make new flying bombs there. I carry a giant drill on my shoulder, with a six-foot bit, which two German workers push into the rock. After a few seconds, I am covered with dust. Stone chips hit my face all the time. The German workers wear helmets and goggles. As for me, standing in front of them like a human shield, I have no protection. These workers insult me when I stop to wipe off the dust. When they pause for lunch, they eat and drink as if I didn't exist. I work for eight hours without ingesting anything but the dust that parches my throat. Although the Polish miners were anti-Semitic, they reacted like human beings. As we worked together, they decided eventually that I was a man like them. They gave me water and even food. In the morning, when I say hi to these Germans, they don't answer. They treat me like a dog. Or
rather, like what I am: a slave. They're no different from the SS.

At the end of the second week, a stone chip flies into my right eye. They forbid me to stop.

“Go on working, shitbag. Close your eye!”