The Street Sweeper (50 page)

‘When was this?’

‘Mr Lamont, you’re supposed to remember these things. I won’t be here forever. I won’t be here in a couple of days.’

‘What do you mean? Don’t talk like that!’

‘They letting me go back to Long Island.’

‘Back home?’

‘Yes. Either I’m better or I’m very sick and soon to be dying. I don’t know which but it doesn’t matter. Dr Washington’s keeping it to herself. You see, if you knew her better … One, Eight, One, Nine, Seven, Zero. I got it in April 1944. You need to remember. They put us – you remember I came with eleven other Jews?’

‘From Sosnowiec, you came in a truck. You hit a man to get clothes that fit you.’

Mr Mandelbrot smiled. ‘Yes, you remember. It was April 1944. I was almost four weeks in Quarantine. That’s where I saw my first
Muselmann
. You know what that is?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a person what is finished with life before life is finished with him. They live because their bodies haven’t died yet. They are skeletons but they still move. They move, they’re hungry all the time like an animal but otherwise they are dead. I saw them and I promised myself I would not become one of them. But it’s easier said than what it is done. These
Muselmänner
didn’t want to become
Muselmänner
when they got to Auschwitz. Four weeks in Quarantine in Auschwitz. I thought I’d seen everything what a man could see. I was wrong. My education was only beginning.

‘Twelve Jews got off the truck with me and went to the
Bekleidungskammer
where they stored the clothes. After maybe four weeks three of us were chosen for the real education. We were the strongest three. Do you know what is the
Sonderkommando?’

‘No.’

‘The
Sonderkommando
was the work detail what worked the gas chambers and ovens in the crematoria. I was in the
Sonderkommando
. I’ll tell you about it and you’ll see why it doesn’t matter what Dr Washington says about why I go home.’

*

Birkenau, by far the largest of the component camps that made up Auschwitz
Vernichtungslager
, extermination camp, lay between two rivers. All around were scattered birch trees that, nourished as they always had been by the sun and watered by the rain, endured wind, frost, snow in the winter, scorching heat in the summer and everything else there was to endure in an upper Silesian Polish swamp. Day after day, month after month, year after year, they grew taller and saw everything that went on but, like all trees, they could not speak, not one word. Other than that, nothing about this place was like anywhere else on earth.

Henryk Mandelbrot’s first day in the
Sonderkommando
came at night. Nothing, not even the ghetto, could have prepared him for this, and for the rest of his life each day for him would be without the sun. In the middle of the night he and two other Jews who had arrived with him on the same truck and had also been previously selected were summoned to report urgently to the
Sonderkommando
, the ‘Special Unit’. They had been chosen on the basis of their apparent physical strength. Henryk Mandelbrot hadn’t heard of the
Sonderkommando
and had no idea what it was. He and the two others were taken hastily to a barrack by two SS men where the next of three shifts of
Sonderkommando
were getting ready to start their shift. The barrack was filled with men, all busily getting dressed; Polish, Dutch, Greek and French. All apart from a handful of high-ranking German prisoners,
Kapos
, were Jews. Henryk Mandelbrot saw that none of these men was talking. They were just putting on their
clothes. The three new men stood among the others not knowing what to do and Henryk Mandelbrot asked a man who was busily getting ready for work, ‘We’re supposed to join you. What do you do?’ ‘You’ve come to burn bodies.’

One of the two SS guards who had brought them to this barrack came inside and told them that since they were already dressed they could start ahead of the others.

‘What do we do?’ Henryk Mandelbrot asked.

‘You look pretty strong for a Jew. Come on, I’ll show you. All of you come with me. Hurry! You’ve got a lot of work to do.’

Henryk Mandelbrot and the other two Jews who had arrived with him followed the SS guard. Joined outside by the second SS guard they were taken to what they would learn was Crematorium V. It had its own gas chamber and outside the gas chamber there lay a mountain of bodies. Mandelbrot shuddered momentarily. So it was true, and here he was, face-to-face with the truth. He had seen people die in the ghetto but he had never seen anything like this. So many bodies, inert, stacked hurriedly one on top of the other, a vast hill of them, a small mountain, so recently people. Here, Mandelbrot thought, was the end of every slur, racial or religious, every joke, every sneer directed against the Jews. Every time someone harboured the belief, or just the sneaking suspicion, even when it shamed them, that the Jews, as a people, are dishonest and immoral, that they are avaricious, deceitful, cunning, that they are capitalists, that they are communists, that they are responsible for all the troubles in the world, that they are guilty of deicide, that belief or suspicion, sometimes barely conscious, adds momentum to a train on a journey of its own; this is where the line finally ends, at this mountain of corpses. The prejudices, the unfounded states of mind, that grow from wariness to dislike to hatred of the ‘other’, they all lead to where Henryk Mandelbrot now stood.

This was his first shift, his first day on the job, but it was the middle of the night. Suddenly it was neither day nor night for him but some new time he had never experienced. If day followed night there would be an end to it as there was for other jobs but there had never been a job like this, not ever. Seeing the mountain of corpses that waited for
him, Mandelbrot knew that
day
, as he had known it, had ended forever. It had ended not just for him but also for the world.

He had heard the rumours but this was far worse than the rumours.

‘What is this?’

‘This is you if you don’t get to work. The others are coming but you’re already dressed so you can start now.’

‘But … what?’

‘Look, Jew, I can shoot you and throw you on the heap and get another one or you can start work and stop asking questions.’

‘But what do we do?’

‘What do you think? The three of you are to start dragging the pieces to the pits over there. Welcome to the
Sonderkommando
. Start now or I’m taking aim. Tell me you understand?’ he said, lifting his rifle.

‘I understand.’

‘Okay, start now. We’re getting very behind. I’m watching you. Move! Move!’

Henryk Mandelbrot bent down to pick up his first body. The floodlights shone down from the towers. In the middle distance dogs were barking at the next transport of Jews, which had already arrived; a fresh trainload of people to be converted into corpses as soon as the system could process them. Terrified, bewildered, thirsty, exhausted, dirty, unsteady on their feet, and with the dogs leaping and barking at them, they stumbled and fell out of the cattle cars they had been packed in for days. It sounded to Henryk Mandelbrot, still with a rifle trained at him, not like the barking of a pack of dogs but like the barking of all the dogs of Europe.

Transports were being unloaded inside the camp for the first time that very month instead of at the
Judenrampe
outside, the rail line extension inside the camp having just been completed in time to facilitate the extermination of the Jews of Hungary. But now the crematoria were unable to cope with so many bodies quickly enough and, to take the pressure off them, pits had to be dug and the corpses burned in these. It was to the extra labour that had to be found to boost each shift of the
Sonderkommando
that Mandelbrot and his two companions had been assigned.

‘Move!’ the SS man shouted above the sound of dogs and the terror of the transport being unloaded in the middle distance. Mandelbrot heard the exhausted Jews getting off the train and he saw the mountain of corpses. He knew the two were separated by an hour or two at the most.

For all his revulsion, he had to move quickly because the guard still had his rifle trained on him. The first corpse he touched from the top of the mound belonged to a child, a girl of no more than ten. His two companions saw him and went for bodies next to the dead girl. The corpse Mandelbrot reached for should have been easy to drag. The child had been starved and there was nothing of her. But when he picked up her hand he couldn’t get a grip of her. The girl’s skin was coming off in his hand. He reached further up her arm as the guard watched but her skin was coming off from her upper arm too. It was like nothing he had ever experienced. These bodies had been lying there for hours. They’d been gassed and the previous shift had been unable to get them through the crematorium because the ovens couldn’t cope. There were just too many bodies to get through in the time allowed and they kept coming. The previous shift had had to leave them there for the next shift and the first members of the next shift were the three new prisoners who had never worked a single shift, one of whom was Henryk Mandelbrot.

Seeing the flesh come off in their hands, the SS guard said almost by way of explanation, ‘That’s not how they’re usually stored. But you better figure something out. I want them moved. Now!’

Henryk Mandelbrot saw where the victims’ clothes were waiting to be sent to
Kanada
where the murdered Jews’ property was stored and he walked over to the heap with the guard still watching him. He picked up a shirt from within the pile and tore it into a long strip out of which he fashioned a crude rope. He walked back with it, intending to slip it around the girl’s body to better drag her. When he bent down to lift the girl’s head with one hand he inadvertently pressed down on her chest with the other, leaning on her slightly and causing a profusion of human gases to come out of her, startling him, arousing fresh revulsion in him and causing the guard to let out a little laugh. With the cloth rope partially around her he stood back upright and began to drag the girl. The other
two Jews hurriedly went to get strips of cloth to do the same. But in their fear they went too quickly to observe the full effect of Mandelbrot’s experiment. It had barely made any difference. After a few paces friction was causing the parts of the body in contact with the ground to detach from the rest of it. The girl’s body was coming away in pieces as he tried to pull it. They were never going to get this hill of corpses to the pit this way. Then Henryk Mandelbrot remembered something he’d seen in his father’s butcher shop. He got a bucket and filled it with water, splashed some of the water on the young girl’s body and the rest of it along the ground that was to be his path to the pit. This worked. Now she would slide.

‘This Jew’s strong
and
clever,’ said the first SS man to the second. ‘He’ll make a good recruit.’ Then as Henryk Mandelbrot made his way towards the vast open pits with the bucket in one hand and the girl’s corpse dragging under the crudely fashioned rope, the SS man called out to him, ‘You’ll do well here.’

‘L
AST NIGHT THERE WAS A MASSACRE
outside the brush-maker’s shop. Who has heard about it? Anyone?’

Emanuel Ringelblum asked this question to the assembly of carefully chosen people seated around the crowded front room, some on chairs, and some on the floor. The door behind them in the second-storey flat on Leszno Street was closed. On the staircase side of the door a teenage boy, Nahum Grzywacz, was keeping watch. This was a meeting of a clandestine organisation. A few people had already heard about the massacre outside the brush-maker’s shop. Someone from inside the room would be assigned the task of finding witnesses. They were to learn and record as much as they could.

It was 1942 and the walls of the Warsaw ghetto had been sealed since November 1940. A third of Warsaw’s pre-war population, its Jews, had been forced into two and a half per cent of the city’s area and then, as the months went on, more and more Jews from all over Poland were added to their number. Hunger was everywhere. While the weather could perhaps be temporarily kept out of a room, even a damp mouldy room within a crumbling building, poor, dilapidated to begin with and made worse by the aerial bombing that accompanied the German invasion of Poland, the sharp, piercing, cunning, relentless hunger followed you into the room. If you had a blanket, it found you under your blanket. If you went to sleep, it went there with you. And when you woke up it was there first
thing, even before you knew where you were. Before you knew who you were, you knew only that you were hungry. If you could not sleep it was there anyway, eating you, eating away at whatever was left inside you, eating the core of you, your hope and your cells. You might try to not think of the pain but you can’t. It laughs. It wins every time. This was how you knew you weren’t dead. You were hungry.

Everyone was always hungry. The poorer you were, the hungrier you were, and with the hunger came weakness and irritability. It became difficult to think clearly and you needed to think clearly to work out how to survive the next day, how to get food. You were sure you could still work if you could find work, and you could look for it if only you could eat. But how were you going to get food, for yourself, for your children, for your wife or husband, for your parents? There were simply too many people within those walls for the calories that were let in. How were you to get food when there just wasn’t enough of it? What were you going to have to do? With hunger of this severity came fatigue, a weakness that transcended tiredness and permeated your sinews and bones. As your limbs got ever lighter, they felt progressively heavier with each new day.

With so many hundreds of thousands of people so hungry, so weak, desperately pressed up next to each other, disease swam about the population with reckless abandon, lethal and unchecked. Disease licked your face like a dog unrestrained. Here is a lick from dysentery. From around the corner comes a kiss on the lips and then into your mouth from typhus. Tuberculosis lusts after you insatiably. Too weak to resist, you are burning up as the marriage is consummated right there on the street. You lie there on the ground, unrecognisable, a nuisance to those still able to make their way to the soup kitchen. Will someone notice your absence there today? They might. You will never know. But you do know what’s going on over there. They all have a fever of their own. It holds their gaze and whispers to them in voices unheard and unheard of outside the ghetto. They are not them and you are not you. Is that you, friendless? Is that you, dying? Is that you, naked in the filth of a grey city street? Among the slowly dying, new thieves are born every day. When did you last speak to anybody, who did you still know who might bury you once your clothes have been stolen?