The Street Sweeper (55 page)

‘Didn’t people suspect what was down there?’

‘How would they know?’

‘I don’t know … rumours?’

‘Yes, there were rumours and some people did suspect. You are right. When there were people who suspected they might move slow down the stairs but then would come down on them a storm of beatings from the SS so hard it could kill you on the spot, so hard that the people went down the stairs away from the beatings they knew were real for sure down to the fate that was still only for them just rumours. People hang on to hope as long as they can, Mr Lamont. Maybe down there is better than up here? Even the ones who suspected, they didn’t know for sure. It had never happened in the history of the world what was about to happen to them. No other people ever had this happen to them. But it didn’t really matter what they thought. This was what was going to happen to them and what they thought only had to do with how long it took. If the Jews could be fooled until they were in the gas chamber it all went along a lot quicker, a lot smoother.’

‘Did you talk to them?’

‘Not much. We weren’t allowed to talk much, only to say certain things the Nazis had told us to say.’

‘Like what?’

‘ “Get undressed. You’re going to have a shower. Remember where you put your clothes.” This sort of thing.’

‘You lied to them? How could you –’

‘Look, what should I do, tell them the truth? Mr Lamont, they are downstairs. They are defenceless. They are undressing then they are naked. For what should we tell them the truth? We wanted to try to take their
fear away. Can you see them? You have to see them; mothers with small children, sometimes with babies at their breast, young girls, teenage girls, people ashamed to be naked, old people what we had to help undress –’

‘You had to undress them?’

‘Yes, sometimes when they were too slow for the Nazis, we had to undress them; people like our fathers and mothers, our grandparents, already sick and weak, frightened. Why frighten them more? What good would it do? We could provide the last comfort what they were going to get on earth before the gas chamber. What good would it do to tell them the truth?’

‘What would have happened to you if you told them the truth? I mean, didn’t you ever want to warn them? Why didn’t you ever warn them?’

‘Why didn’t we warn them?’

*

The first five came down the stairs. No one wanted to look at them. Henryk Mandelbrot was one of approximately twenty
Sonderkommando
members standing in the undressing room of Crematorium II. He stood in the middle of the room. The floor was grey concrete and the walls were white. Around the entire circumference of the room were smooth pine benches and above these there were hooks with numbers next to them. It looked like a very large, very narrow, but otherwise unremarkable gymnasium locker room. When the number of
Sonderkommando
men outnumbered the victims, as it always did for the first minute or so, it was hard to find an excuse not to look the victims in the eye. What made it worse was that, unless for some reason it was an all-male group, the first to come down were usually women. In addition to whatever the women had just been through and in addition to whatever they suspected they were about to go through, they were exhausted, confused and very ashamed to have to undress to the point of complete nakedness in front of strangers. There were married women who had only ever been naked in front of their husbands. There were old women, little girls and teenage girls from small villages,
shtetls
, girls who had only ever
been naked in front of their mothers years earlier. They found it hard to imagine even being married to a man who was permitted to touch their bodies and to see them naked. Now here they were being told to undress in brusque, sharp tones by SS men whom each one knew meant them no good; men of the type that had put them in ghettoes, men who were fully dressed, armed, uniformed soldiers of Hitler. And it wasn’t enough to simply undress. They had to undress very quickly. The SS men greeted the women’s naked bodies variously, at best with short-tempered indifference, usually with harsh words sometimes further humiliating them, and frequently with violence.

The first five women were spoken to firmly in a no-nonsense manner by the SS men in the undressing room. Some of them wondered why armed SS men had to watch them get undressed for a shower. Something was not right. And who were these other men, seemingly prisoners, also interested in getting them undressed as quickly as possible to go to the shower room next door? These men, the prisoners, seemed to be Jews. They were speaking to them in Yiddish but they would not look at them.

‘Come on now. You have to hurry. Leave your things by a hook and remember the number on it,’ Henryk Mandelbrot said to a woman whose shame seemed to be paralysing her. He couldn’t look her in the eye as he spoke but he saw an SS man looking at him as he was speaking to the slowly undressing woman and then, with small relief, he saw the officer’s gaze shift from him to other
Sonderkommando
men, to Schubach, Ochrenberg, Touba and Raijsmann, as another five women came down the stairs, then another five and another five followed by another and still another. Very quickly there were more victims than
Sonderkommando
or SS men in the undressing room even though once undressed the women were ordered down the hall to the room with the shower faucets. Now some men started coming down the stairs in rows of five. They were being screamed at by the SS men upstairs or was it the five people immediately behind them or the five behind them? Already the beatings had started up the stairs to make things go faster and five pushed five to escape the beatings. The first five men saw women undressing and clothes left in piles around the room.

‘You can pick your things up after the shower,’ Mandelbrot said to an old man who seemed to have trouble believing what he was seeing. The man moved slowly, too slowly. Henryk Mandelbrot knew the man would be beaten any second if he didn’t start making progress undressing.

‘You have to hurry!’ A baby was crying, which set off another baby. A mother tried to comfort it but she had to undress both the baby and herself quickly. An SS man was watching her and she saw him. With the baby in her arms, she turned her back to him.

‘The showers …’ the old man asked Mandelbrot. ‘They’re the same ones for men
and
for women?’

‘Yes, they’re the same,’ Mandelbrot said to the old man without emotion, at the same time helping him with his coat. Five more came down, followed by another five, some of whom were freshly bleeding from their heads, all of whom were pushed by the five behind them. Then another five …

‘You’re a Jew?’ the old man asked Henryk Mandelbrot.

‘Yes. You have to hurry. They’ll beat both of us if you’re too –’

‘It’s gas, isn’t it?’

Mandelbrot turned away from this old man as five more people came down the stairs into the undressing room, followed by another five, then another five and another five after that. Henryk Mandelbrot had to look away from the stairway. But where could he look? Another five came down followed by another five and then another five. A girl of around twelve was carrying her brother who looked to be no more than three. Mandelbrot went to her and her brother.

‘Don’t touch him, you Jewish murderer! He’ll die with me … in my arms.’

Then came another five, then another, a carpenter whose wife used to say he worked too much, a tailor came, then a man with a singing voice that all his neighbours had enjoyed since he was a child, a teacher was there who had hoped to be a principal some day, a widow who sewed clothes, a nurse who had had an affair with a patient, a slightly overweight boy of eleven with wavy hair who felt he had never been able to live up to his parents’ expectations, he was also there. The fattest man of his village was going to have to undress in a hurry too. A newly
graduated doctor was there and, unbeknown to him, way off in the corner there was one of his professors from medical school. A man who had been unfaithful to his wife once in another town while on business was there, a pharmacist who had always gone out of his way to help people, a girl who kept calling out for her sister, a woman who had brought food to widows in the hope of pleasing God, a thief, a man who sold candles, a prostitute who had run away from home, a man who failed to get into art school but who had kept drawing all his life never showing his work to anyone, the wife of a man who hawked spices, an engineer, a fishmonger, a woman whose husband often embarrassed her was there, a man who worked with his brothers in a foundry, the daughter of a stonemason, a man whose blindness was not evident to others, a mathematician, a woman who loved fashion magazines was there with her daughter who dreamed of one day being in them. Then another five came down, including a rabbi and a chazan and a woman who had tried to see every movie that came to her town, and still the Jews kept coming. They heard the command to undress and began to do what everybody else was doing before being forced by SS men into the other room to wait for the shower. Then another five.

The undressing room was crowded and hot. Schubach, Ochrenberg, Touba and Raijsmann were there with Henryk Mandelbrot. Spread out, they and the others in the detail were saying the same things to the Jews who kept coming in wave after wave of five. Under the eye of an SS man, a
Sonderkommando
member, Wentzel, began to use his fists on a woman who undressed too slowly. An undressing man looked at him in disgust and the woman undressed faster. This was a full transport of close to 2000 people. The undressing room was filling up even as it emptied when the naked people went to the room next door. There was going to be a huge mound of clothes to clear; clothes of all types and sizes as well as all the little, small, last-minute things people took with them in their clothes or on their person. There would be small photos of loved ones, a letter of commendation from the German Army from World War I, a comb, a grandparent’s wedding ring, a page blank but for someone’s signature, a miniature teddy bear, some cash imperfectly hidden in the lining of a coat, a pen, a love letter, something small for the baby to eat,
a telephone number scrawled on the back of a bus ticket and a yarmulke for after the shower.

Henryk Mandelbrot saw Ochrenberg go over to a beautiful young woman with dark eyes and thick black hair who was there with a child, a sister or a daughter. Mandelbrot couldn’t tell. What was wrong? Ochrenberg was there too long. Was he talking to her? He was taking too long. The woman stopped undressing, looked at Ochrenberg and started shouting something. Suddenly Ochrenberg moved away from her as fast as he could. From a distance Mandelbrot saw the mood of tension and anxiety change around this woman to one of unequivocal panic. The SS men saw it too. Like a ripple spreading across a pond after a stone has been thrown in, the closer to Ochrenberg’s woman, the greater the panic.

‘It’s not water in the showers. It’s gas! It’s gas!’ the woman shouted.

‘Gas?’

‘They mean to gas us!’

A rain of blows came down on this half-undressed woman. People, even the child, moved away from her as the SS men clubbed her to the ground, beating her furiously. She lay there, panting, her torn slip leaking blood from her lacerated breasts and head. What had Ochrenberg hoped to achieve? The last of the transport were being shoved down the stairs as the young woman lay unconscious. Mandelbrot had to take the clothes off her child, who was now hysterical. The child struggled violently, twisting in every direction to break free, twisting in Mandelbrot’s arms like a creature possessed. If he let her go they would beat her too.

The last few rows of five could not help see how terrified those ahead of them were. They saw the young woman collapsed amid the piles of clothing. A mother from among the last in was calling out, ‘My son! My son is missing! He is in a blue coat. He’s wearing a blue coat. He’s three years old. I just want to find my son. He was holding my …’ The woman started to go back up the stairs, explaining that she wanted to find her son, but an SS man grabbed her around the waist, threw her to the ground and shot her in the head. By then most of the transport were out of the undressing room and either in the corridor that led from the undressing room to the gas chamber or already in the gas chamber.

Undressed, they went through the door, the only door, with the sign ‘To the Disinfection Room’. Strangers stood naked together in this room where the ceiling was markedly lower than in the undressing room. It was warm, warmer than the undressing room. At first they stood apart but as the room filled with more and more people they were forced to get closer and closer until they could not help but touch each other. Children cried. Adults tried to comfort them. Adults cried. Children looked for their parents. They called out for them as the room filled.

‘Where are you? Are you here? Take my hand.’

Some were too ashamed to look at one another. Some looked in astonishment. What world was this? This was wrong. It felt wrong. Some looked at the shower faucets in the ceiling. Some looked for the God they and their parents and their grandparents had tried so hard to please. Some called out to the Germans in anger. They looked around the room as other people called out, called to each other, to their children, to the SS, to God. There were lights along the centre of the ceiling encaged for protection. Families, if they could, stayed close together. They hugged. When a father suspected the truth he would hug his wife and his children, not voicing his suspicion, but they would see him crying silently and they would cry. Soon everyone around them was crying. In the middle of the room were four pillars made of layers of metal mesh.

People in the room with the shower faucets were too disoriented and distressed to notice the pillars immediately. Who thought about the architecture of the room? Would the water be hot? Would it be warm? Were there really enough faucets for all these people? But soon, any moment, everyone in the room would notice the pillars. People were packed into this room and at the door someone screamed with an unmatched urgency. This scream came from the last person, beaten by the butt of an SS rifle and pushed in. There was no longer any space left in the room. The truth was becoming clearer. They were all of them in a gas chamber. Many now knew what was going to happen after an SS man closed the sealed door.