Schreiber's Secret (4 page)

As the dust cleared, the two men saw that they were only a couple of metres apart, cradled in the debris of death.

The wretched cries of the entombed were soon drowned by a combination of laughter and shouting from the SS men who had raced into the courtyard on hearing the blast.

“Save the pickaxes and spades!” came a familiar voice. “Those of you Yids still alive dig the others out.”

Soferman, Springer and the other survivors began clawing desperately at the rubble. Soferman, shrugging aside the pain, worked as a man possessed, the hatred he felt for Schreiber coursing through his veins. The politicals, too, joined the rescue, and the anguished cries of the buried became louder as more and more broken masonry was removed.

Soferman saw a hand projecting through the rubble. It turned and twisted like a defrocked
glove puppet. The Berliner clasped the hand gently and called out, “Are you okay?”

“I think my ribs are busted and both my legs are broken,” gasped the hand’s owner. “Water, for God’s sake, water.”

“Oskar!” screamed Soferman. “Come and help me with this poor bastard.”

Springer scrambled over the rubble and they began dragging the heavy blocks from around the hand. After what seemed an eternity, the two had managed to remove enough for a couple of politicals to drag the unfortunate man clear.

Although the face was caked in dust, Soferman could see that it was the man who had led them to the wall. The Jew with no name groaned. He was semiconscious, his body lying atop the debris like an abandoned marionette.

“Wheelbarrows!” screamed a voice with the authority of one who had experienced such scenes before.

Soferman, totally exhausted, sat and watched as a group of political brought the wheelbarrows. They loaded the dead and the dying crosswise and carted them away, among them the Jew with no name. In any other circumstances he would have been rushed to hospital and his injuries would have been treated. He would have survived. But the Jew with no name was at the bottom of the heap, his broken body draped over the edge, his head bobbing on the ground until coma and death relieved him of his torment.

Soferman sat watching the head in macabre fascination as the wheelbarrow passed out of sight. He too wished to die. He was twenty-two, alone in a cesspit of humanity with only one friend with whom to share his agony. He knew he would die. But not like this.
And not without taking revenge.

“SOFERman, stop loafing and follow me.”

The voice, coated in venom, dissolved the Berliner’s daydream. He hauled himself to his feet, glanced apprehensively at Springer, and fell in behind the straight black back.

“How old are you, Soferman?” asked Schreiber without turning round.

“Twenty-two, Obersturmführer.”

“Ah, same as me, SOFERman. Same as me.”

The Nazi must have known that already from the identity card, thought the Jew. “Well, SOFERman,” the voice went on, “if you want to celebrate your twenty-third birthday, you will remain silent during the events I want to show you. I like you. We Berliners must stick together.”

And with
this the Nazi’s head turned and the small brown eyes looked askance at the Jew. “But not too closely, eh?” he chuckled. “With that blond hair you may not look like a typical Yid, but you’re Yid enough for me.”

Soferman followed Schreiber into one of the many rooms leading from the courtyard. In the centre of the bare stone floor was what looked like a horse-
trough. Leading into it was a hosepipe. The sound of gushing water made Soferman realize how terribly thirsty he was, for the brick dust had left his mouth parched and raw.

“Look inside,” beckoned Schreiber.

Soferman peered into the trough. There were two blocks of white lying on the bottom.

“Ice, my friend,” said Schreiber menacingly, glancing at his watch. “You may drink from it, but not now. In a few minutes, maybe.”

The sound of shuffling feet combined with the ring of jackboots could be heard coming from the corridor. Seconds later, an elderly Jew was pushed into the room by a guard.

“Ah, grandfather Moses,” said Schreiber, the rows of perfect white teeth gleaming in sentinel splendour. Lavender permeated the coolness of the room.

“
Shema Yisroe
l
,” croaked the white-bearded Jew in biblical affirmation of his faith. He knew he was going to die.

“Take off your clothes, Yid,” said Schreiber with the contempt of a man who knew he held ultimate power.

Soferman watched as the old man, probably a rabbi, shed his prison uniform and stood naked and shivering before them. His frail body was like yellow parchment, his genitalia massive in comparison with the frame supporting them.

“Stand next to the trough, Jew-pig!”

The old man, paralysed with fear, did not move. His rheumy eyes beseeched the only person in the room from whom he might gain succour. But Herschel Soferman’s stare was vacant, the small hazel eyes unable to bear witness to the rabbi’s torment.

The guard, a huge brute, stepped forward and in one swift movement lifted the old rabbi by his ankles and hoisted him headlong into the trough. The rabbi’s shriek was pathetic. Drained of strength by lack of food and his advancing years, the old man did not possess the will to struggle for life. He bobbed to the surface once before Schreiber turned him over with his riding crop and pushed down on the chest.

Soferman could not look away, his gaze transfixed by the bloodless visage staring out from beneath the surface. It appeared to him that the death grimace was a smile, the last desperate defiance of a stiff-necked Hebrew.

Although he was far from being religious, he would sa
y
Kaddis
h
for the old man. After a few more moments, Schreiber ceased holding the man down. He then turned to Soferman. “Now you may drink,” he said simply.

Soferman, any vestige of resistance drained from him by the experiences of the day, stepped forward as would an automaton and drank from the trough. He was oblivious to the icy mixture of water and urine. “That’s enough,” said Schreiber quickly. “You don’t pay the water bill.”

Soferman stood up and wiped his grime-caked face with his hands.

“You know, Soferman, as I said before, I quite like you. I’d like to know more about you.
Your background. Your family. I may be able to find out where they are. It pays to be one of Hans Schreiber’s favourites, you know.”

The Jew’s eyes opened wide. The incongruity of Schreiber’s request was grotesque. Here they were, the tortured and the torturer, about to have a conversation about old times to which a third man, lying beneath icy waters, would forever bear silent witness.

Yet, almost despite himself, Herschel Soferman began to talk. The very mention of his family brought back a flood of memories of the good and bad times in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district.

Hans Schreiber suddenly became all charm, drawing from his prisoner intimate details of his life and family. The Nazi knew the weakness of every man who had been starved of love and warmth
; the compulsion to grab hold of every opportunity to reminisce about the good old days, even if it was with their inquisitor. Not for nothing had he become one of the youngest junior officers in the SS. He saw himself as a beacon in a mire of mediocrity.

“That’s enough, Soferman,” said the Nazi, suddenly tiring of the largely one-way conversation. “Guard, take him back to his cell.”

Schreiber’s abruptness caught the Jew off guard, making him suddenly aware that he had just shared his most intimate secrets with the epitome of evil.

“Don’t let me down tomorrow,” was Schreiber’s parting shot, the words failing to register in the mind of a young man now denuded totally of the only thing that had remained a bulwark against the desperation of his present. His past.

If the day had been torment for Herschel Soferman, then the night brought an anguish and misery the likes of which he had never experienced. On being returned to the cell, he was given some tasteless gruel and left to nurse his aches and pains alone until the return of his fellow inmates. It was then, after sundown, that the torture began.

The prisoners shuffled silently into the cell one by one, each man plumbing the depths of his personal misery. None had been in the cell for more than a month and the veterans were already bordering on insanity. By the time the twentieth man had entered, Soferman was beginning to feel the first stirrings of claustrophobia. He had still not spotted Springer among the sweating and grimy bodies. The man next to him sank on his heels and held his head in his hands in total exhaustion. No one spoke as still more inmates packed into the cell. The air became fetid and the odours of sweat and urine were suffocating. Soferman found that the only way he too could rest was by sinking onto his heels.

There must have been more than sixty men in the room by the time the door was bolted. Men without hope and dignity. Men caged like chickens in a coop, their wings clipped, wallowing in their own excrement. How they wished they were animals, dumb and ignorant. Suffering was universal but only Man could attach the label.

And thus did Herschel Soferman spend the worst night of his life, a night during which his aching joints, yearning to be stretched, fought with his mind, yearning to sleep. Some actually managed to sleep sitting on their heels, but never on the first night. On the first night in the Jew-cell of the Small Fortress of Theresienstadt, the mind exhausted itself rejecting the pain, leaving its owner utterly drained.

As the dawn sun streamed through the cell window, Herschel Soferman was surprised to find himself still alive. He could hardly move, the stiffness in his joints setting his muscles afire. Others stirred, their soft moans testament to shared torment. It was then that Soferman felt the coldness at his side. One more Jew with no name had been granted eternal release, never again to fear the rising of the sun. A sudden pang of envy gripped the Berliner.

Suddenly, the bolts on the cell door were drawn and one of the guards stood menacingly before them.

“Out, you shits!” he bellowed. “Leave the dead where they are until after roll call.”

As the men without hope filed into the courtyard, Soferman caught sight of Springer shuffling between two larger figures. It was obvious that his friend was in great pain. The Berliner shrugged aside his own torment and moved forward quickly to fall
in behind him. He knew that any sign of weakness would be punished mercilessly by the guards.

“Oskar,” he whispered. “It’s me. Don’t turn around. For God’s sake pick up your step. Don’t show them you’re beaten. Do you hear me, Oskar?”

Springer was mute. He had neither the strength nor the will to communicate. He had become an automaton, unfeeling and remote. Insanity was but a hair’s breadth away.

The two friends stood next to one another in the first of six rows of bedraggled prisoners. In the half-light of dawn their bodies craved the warmth of the sun’s virgin rays.

“Stand to attention, you Jew-pigs!” barked a familiar voice to their right. Hans Schreiber marched ramrod erect into the courtyard, beating the riding stick against his thigh in a metronomic beat. Scuttling behind him was one of the politicals. The man was labouring with a bucket and spade.

“Put them down and wait by the bucket,” the Nazi ordered,
then turned to the pitiful parade before him. “Now, you swine. Call out your names and don’t forget the prefixes.”

“
Stinkjud
e
Goldstein,” called out the man at the end of Soferman’s line.

“
Saujud
e
Feinberg,” came the next.

“
Stinkjud
e
Schwenk,” said a voice in a Czech accent.

It was obvious to Soferman that he was meant to call out his name with the appropriate prefix. But the Berliner was more concerned about the man to his left, who was last in line.

“
Stinkjud
e
Soferman,” he cried out automatically when his turn came.

Then silence.

Soferman, not daring to move or speak, prayed that Springer would answer roll call. For a few moments, even Hans Schreiber seemed lost for words. But he knew that there would always be one bastard who would not be a good little Jew-boy. That was why he had brought the bucket.

“Ach, so,” he said at length, the small brown eyes narrowing to slits. “This little Yid seems to have forgotten his name. Perhaps a little food might help him remember. Step forward.”

As Springer shuffled forward, the political, a stubby man who looked relatively well fed, took his cue and thrust the spade into the bucket. The smell left the prisoners in no doubt as to its contents.

“Best pig-shit for you, my little friend,” spat Schreiber. “A true delicacy in the best tradition o
f
kashru
t
.”

Soferman was surprised by the Nazi’s use of the word for Jewish dietary law. Mos
t
goyi
m
knew only the wor
d
koshe
r
. But his musing was cut short when the spade was thrust under his friend’s nose by the political. The sight and smell of the turd made him want to retch. The spade rose higher until the faeces, still steaming, brushed Springer’s aquiline nose. And still the little man did not move.