The Street Sweeper (56 page)

In the undressing room Henryk Mandelbrot and the other
Sonderkommando
men in this detail, including Schubach, Ochrenberg, Touba and Raijsmann, looked at each other and at the mountains of clothing. They
were numb. They were always numb. Sometimes they were grateful they were not inside the gas chamber but mostly now they felt nothing.

‘What are you waiting for, you pieces of shit?’ an SS man shouted at them. ‘Pick up the clothes!’

Pointing with the toe of his boot to the mother of the missing three-year-old boy in the blue coat, the SS man who had shot her said to Mandelbrot, ‘Here’s another one for you,’ and, putting his pistol away, he began to leave the undressing room hurriedly to try to see the gassing from the upstairs window outside. Suddenly he stopped and turned around to speak to Mandelbrot.

‘If the ovens are still backed up, take her to the pits while the others are getting the clothes. Be quick. I have another job for you men.’

Outside the crematorium complex, a truck deceptively bearing the symbol of the Red Cross had arrived and from the back, sealed metal canisters were taken out. An SS man donned a gas mask and with a hammer and a knife he opened a canister. Its contents, Zyklon B, consisted of pellets of very porous rock saturated with hydrogen cyanide. The SS man in the gas mask now opened the hatches on top of the projections through the roof of the four metal mesh pillars in the gas chamber and poured in the Zyklon B. A man with this duty got extra cigarettes and, provided there were not too many officers crowding out the view, he got to watch the gassing through a sealed peephole in the door. It was a very popular task.

The green pellets of Zyklon B fell to the bottom of each of the hollow pillars and, warmed in the preheated and now overcrowded chamber, the volatile hydrogen cyanide with which the pellets were saturated started to vapourise and diffuse out through the metal mesh. People nearest the pillars gasped first in shock but, very soon after, for breath. Then the coughing started all over the room and within minutes people were not any longer themselves. Their cells were being deprived of oxygen by the cyanide and they were being asphyxiated. As the cyanide took effect and their very organs screamed out for oxygen, people experienced a terror unlike any they had ever known, an instant unfiltered prerational autonomic primeval panic. But they were physically unable to stifle the reflex to breathe and so they breathed in more of the poison.

The cyanide vapourising out of the pellets at the bottom of the pillars spread into the room through the metal mesh and rose upward. The lowest points in the room were initially the most toxic but with every second the rest of the room was catching up. It was in the seconds before the gas had colonised all parts of the room equally that the climbing started. People were not any longer remotely like the people they had been all their lives up to the time the pellets started taking effect. As consciousness began to leave them they behaved not like parents or husbands or wives or friends or brothers and sisters but like the most basic organisms without the capacity to do a single thing in their struggle not to die except try desperately to get away from the gas as it made its way upward and filled the room. The smallest, the weakest, the most frail were being crushed as the man with the beautiful singing voice, the carpenter, the younger of the two doctors, the engineer, the thief, climbed over and then stood on the body and sometimes then on the head of the woman whose husband used to embarrass her, the eleven-year-old boy with the wavy hair, the teacher, the prostitute, the daughter of the stonemason, the man who never showed anyone his drawings, the old man who was slow to undress, the woman who liked fashion magazines, her daughter. And on the children, and the old.

The pain was quickly extreme. People drooled like animals. Their eyes bulged. Their bodies began to jerk in wild spasms as the gas rendered completely useless whatever oxygen they could find. After three minutes they were bleeding, some from the scramble, the struggle to the top of the heap, but all from the effect of the gas. They bled from their noses. They bled from their ears. People lost continence and many were pushed down into a mess of blood, urine, vomit and excrement as people with memories, affections, ambitions, relationships, opinions, values and accomplishments all merged into a tangled phalanx of human beings a metre deep covered in their own fluids, all of them gasping, their bodies jerking, their faces distorted by their agony. With their brains and their organs increasingly depleted of oxygen with every second, it was in a state of unimaginable terror and pain that they had their last thoughts. They were already no longer people.

The
Sonderkommando
men in the undressing room heard the screams and knew well their pattern; louder and louder and louder until they
reached a peak and then began to subside. They continued working, each man desperate for the arrival of the silence. They knew it was coming but they couldn’t wait for it. Then when the silence came, the agony from the next room would be over, leaving these men, the last to see the victims alive, to deduce it from the hellish distortions of their faces and from the contorted positions of their bodies within the tangle of bodies when the door was opened.

Henryk Mandelbrot undressed the murdered mother of the three-year-old and threw her clothes on the pile. Knowing the ovens were still backed up, he dragged her by the arm to the burning pits outside where the corpses of a previous transport lay piled up waiting for
Sonderkommando
men to throw them on the pile in the ditches. As he got closer the flames rose higher than his eye could see. He coughed and almost choked on the smell. The men working here had tied material around their mouths and noses but Mandelbrot was there only to drop off one corpse. This wasn’t his detail. His eyes watered. He let go of the dead woman’s hand to rub his eyes and that’s when he saw the other men around him stop. He saw they were looking at
Oberscharführer
Moll standing at the edge of the pit.

Oberscharführer
Moll had in his arms a three-year-old boy with dark brown hair bundled up in a blue coat crying out for his mother. He let the boy drop from his arms to the ground so that the child lay winded on his back. The boy was in shock. Then with one recently polished boot raised high, Moll stomped down on the boy’s face. The child screamed in terror at what he saw coming towards him, and then wailed in agony.
Oberscharführer
Moll bent down to pick up the disfigured boy. He took the blue coat off the whimpering blood-soaked child, tossed the coat over his shoulder and then threw the boy like a sack of wheat on to the top of the pyre of burning bodies. Henryk Mandelbrot heard the child screaming from the top of the fire. The boy had not been dead when he was thrown in. Mandelbrot picked up the naked corpse of the child’s mother and slung it on the pyre next to her son, as close as he could. Then he hurried back to the undressing room.

Schubach, Ochrenberg, Touba, Raijsmann, Wentzel and the others were working through the piles of clothes in the undressing room when
he got back. The gas chamber should have been opened by then but, for some reason, that seemed to have been delayed. Mandelbrot was just realising this when
Oberscharführer
Schillinger appeared surrounded by a group of SS men.

‘Are they all here?’ he asked one of the SS men.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Each one?’

‘Yes, sir. The other one just got back.’

‘Good. All of you go immediately to the ovens in Crematorium III. Now! Hurry! All of you!’

Henryk Mandelbrot and each of the others who had been with him in the undressing room knew that all of the ovens at Crematorium III and indeed all of the ovens at all four of Birkenau’s gas chamber and crematoria installations had no capacity for extra bodies. The ovens were not keeping up with the corpses they already had and were falling behind. This was why the mass pits outside were being used again. It didn’t make any sense for these men to report to the ovens in Crematorium III, especially when their work on the most recent transport’s clothes in the undressing room of the Crematorium II complex to which they were assigned had not been completed. Additionally, the gas chamber next door to the ovens where they now stood still held the 2000 people, now corpses, just freshly gassed. It needed to be cleared and cleaned for the people who were already waiting outside listening to an SS officer tell them about their need to be disinfected before being transferred to their new work detail.

But whatever their misgivings about the reasons behind the order, no one would delay obeying
Oberscharführer
Schillinger. Better they should run straight to the electric wire fence and end it that way. So they all went, unaccompanied by SS guards and without hesitation, to the ovens of Crematorium III. The smell of the burning flesh was nauseating. A few of them gagged. Among the stokers there was Zalman Gradowski who saw these men arrive as he was laying the corpse of a young man, the last of three people, onto the metal stretcher tray and was sliding it into the oven. Then he closed the heavy semi-circular oven door and the bodies started burning.

‘What are you all doing here? We’re not ready for any more. Look!’ he said, directing their attention to a pile of corpses waiting to be pushed into the ovens. ‘Mandelbrot, what’s going on?’

‘I don’t know. Schillinger ordered us to come here. He didn’t tell us why.’

Hearing Schillinger’s name caused Zalman Gradowski to stop what he was doing. He looked at Mandelbrot for an explanation from within his eyes if one was not to be forthcoming in his words. And it was then that he saw
Oberscharführer
Schillinger walk into the crematorium accompanied by a number of SS guards.

‘Take your pieces out,’
Oberscharführer
Schillinger ordered Gradowski, referring to the corpses in the oven. Nobody had ever heard an order like this before. The men working at the other furnaces stopped working and looked around at the scene before them.

‘Did anybody tell you to stop working? Get on with it!’ Schillinger yelled at the other stokers and they went back to work without hesitation.

Zalman Gradowski had no intention of chancing Schillinger’s wrath but, nonetheless, he couldn’t believe he had heard the order correctly. Was it more dangerous to stop burning the corpses he was working on when he and the others were constantly ordered to ‘speed it up’ or was it more dangerous to check his understanding of the order? For a moment everyone, including the SS men who had come in with Schillinger, stared at Gradowski. Only minutes earlier he had been quietly attending to his work, burning people, numb to the task after so many bodies, after so many shifts. His mind had escaped to an event in the past before the war, which is where all of him but his body resided. Now suddenly
Oberscharführer
Schillinger had appeared, was standing there, singling him out in front of
Sonderkommando
men who weren’t even supposed to be there. Schillinger was giving him an order that defied the rationale for his continued existence. Did they think he was working too slowly? What was going on? Zalman Gradowski was confused, which meant, in his present circumstances, that he was terrified.

‘Take them out, sir?’

‘Take them out, Jew!’ Schillinger roared.

Gradowski opened the door to the oven and, with a metal rake-like implement, pulled the three bodies out of the oven and onto the iron stretcher tray. Now the smell was unbearable and two of the SS men gagged. The hands and feet of the first two bodies, red in some places, charred and badly blistered in others, had already started to shrivel, curving to arch upwards.

‘Put them on the floor,’ Schillinger said, calmly this time.

Using a rake as a pitch fork, Gradowski emptied the tray of the corpses one by one. Nobody said a word as he did this. Nobody knew what was going on. Gradowski was completely at a loss when suddenly Schillinger turned to Mandelbrot, Schubach, Ochrenberg, Touba, Raijsmann, Wentzel and the others who had come from the undressing room on his orders and he began to address them calmly. The other stokers strained to hear what was being said without being conspicuous about it.

‘We had some problems with the last transport in the undressing room, didn’t we? It slowed us down. Sometimes we have delays beyond our control. I understand this. We’re all up against it. There’s so much to get through. But we just now experienced a problem that, fortunately,
is
easily overcome.’

He stopped for a moment and turned back to the direction of the oven. He took a step towards it, peering in to examine the fire that never went out. The unearthly heat, even from a distance, made his face perspire. He continued calmly, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief from a pocket.

‘Listen, men, when you warn them, they panic. When they panic it slows us down and that’s bad for all of us,’ he said, stepping back from the oven and wiping his forehead again and then examining the extent to which the moisture had been absorbed by the otherwise pristine white cloth. ‘We tell you this all the time. You can’t say we don’t. Just say what we tell you to say. It’s not difficult to remember and it will make your work much easier. Don’t warn them. Please, don’t warn them,’ he said softly. Then he closed his eyes as if exhausted and nodded slightly, just once, whereupon, before the
Sonderkommando
realised what was happening, three SS men grabbed Ochrenberg, one at each arm and one at his
legs and they shoved him head first into Gradowski’s yawning oven. The sound of Ochrenberg’s screams from inside the oven made everybody in the room stop their work but now this sudden unscheduled break from their labour didn’t seem to bother
Oberscharführer
Schillinger at all. The short time lost was an investment in efficiency. Now they could all go back to the undressing room before emptying their gas chamber and a new man could be brought from a new transport to join the ranks of the
Sonderkommando
to replace Ochrenburg.

All of this took place within the first seventy-five minutes of one shift of one day of Henryk Mandelbrot’s term in the
Sonderkommando
at Birkenau.