Sunrise West (2 page)

I was thin, but upright and passably fit. My hair, bleached by the sun, was combed back off my forehead. I was about two weeks short of my twenty-second birthday.

Within the blink of an eye I became bestially free, a lone caged animal on the prowl. Was this a prerequisite for survival? I am not trying to explain, there is nothing to elucidate. The shadows of a life cunningly hide from light. There is an irresistible will in all of us: the will to live at any cost. Yet such a thing can exist only where life has a meaning, and this place, unstable as water, graveyard of human decency, had no meaning, no meaning at all.

On a pitch-black night, by the piercing searchlight that kept camp morality in place, we, the chosen to live, marched five abreast past the pit of flames. I still recall the smell of burning flesh, and the escorting
kapo
's matter-of-fact remark: ‘It's good to burn the corpses in the open, the flames will chase away the mosquitoes. Watch the sky at daybreak, you dumb bastards, you may find a familiar face in the clouds.'

Our contingent, several hundred men, was herded into Block 5. The barrack was soaked in a darkness one could almost touch. A solitary swinging bulb kept fathering sickly shadows.

Then, like a nightmare out of the foreboding darkness, there appeared a faceless man. He wore a white Panama hat, tennis shoes, and silver-rimmed sunglasses. Hunching his neck and shoulders as if somehow deranged, weaving the air with his too-short arms, he spoke with a rasping voice, like that of a blunt saw, in Yiddish, Polish and German: ‘Men, take note. For your own good, I'll give you five minutes to reveal what you have hidden in your stomachs. After that time I'll bring in the X-ray machine. Death awaits anyone who is withholding his treasures.'

Five volunteers were immediately taken to a separate room, and each given a strong laxative and a clean pot. Facing the wall, they relieved themselves of their burdens. After a few blows with cudgels, they were kicked back into the barrack.

Everything happened as if in a trance, but when the faceless stranger took off his sunglasses I recognized at once Chaml, underworld hero, pimp of Bałuty, known for his hard dull gaze and his rapist's smile.

 

 
Settling In
 

Our superior and block-eldest (
Blockälteste
), Romek, chosen by the camp authorities, was a plain-looking man of about twenty-three, with a pockmarked face, a sharply protruding nose and a missing right ear, apparently the target of a shooting contest between some Germans. On his left arm was tattooed the word
Czuwaj
, the greeting of the young socialist fraternity of which I had been a member. A day
after arrival I plucked up some courage, approached him and pointed to his tattoo, hoping to awake in him a recognition of our common past. How foolish of me. There was no time here for any past. Here only the present reigned — the
now
of which we understood nothing — and, hovering between a yes and a no, the constant opportunity to lose one's life. For my silly attempt I received a decent beating and no food for the rest of the day. As the
kapo
swallowed my last crust of bread, I recalled my father's wisdom: If you encounter an impossible storm, just run for cover and wait unashamedly for the sun to come out again.

In the small hours of the night, as I lay freezing on the concrete floor, I heard a whisper from the spot beside me, the voice of a man I would befriend. ‘Stay away from Romek. He is like the splintered reed of a staff, which pierces the palm of anyone who leans on it.'

Raymond, fourteen years my senior, was a French Jew from Lyons who spoke excellent Yiddish. In the old days he had taught Bible and art in a private high school. He had received a profoundly religious upbringing, and like myself had once believed that mankind could create a new and better world. But the war, his country's defeat, the hounding down of Jews, his own betrayal and arrest (he had been here since 1942), the gassing of his wife Suzanne and their four-year-old son Michel — all this had transformed a once trusting man into a bitter denier, a frightful scoffer. ‘I am a lucky nothing,' he would cry, ‘chosen by the greatest Nothing of all!'

Our day began at 4.30 a.m. with the hollow sound of a huge wooden spoon being beaten against the bottom of a
large empty tin pot, accompanied by the
kapo
's scream: ‘
Aufstehen! Aufstehen!
' After a dish of lukewarm ‘coffee', we would stand to attention like frightened stalks awaiting the sickle. We were counted, recounted; it seldom tallied. ‘Too many disobedient corpses,' was how Raymond put it. ‘They refuse to obey the gong.' Such unruly behaviour on the part of the missing provoked the
kapos
, and we would usually receive a thrashing.

One evening he told me: ‘A Jew, alive or dead, must obey orders. Jews who die of their own volition, especially those who end their lives at night on the electric wires, are giving the Germans a great deal of trouble. How dare these damn Jews take matters into their own hands? Last year a man in Block 7 hanged himself with a rope made from his own striped uniform. The SS
Blockführer
was furious. How dare they make ropes out of German property! He promptly lined up about 150 prisoners, and scrutinized every face until he found two who
looked
to him like they were the kind who would encourage sabotage. After clubbing these two nearly to death, he ordered the
kapo
to throw them on a lorry of corpses bound for the crematorium.'

Raymond shook his head. ‘You know,' he went on, ‘I read somewhere that the builders of Babel were a godless, inhuman lot. If, in the course of construction, a worker fell to his death, no one paid any heed; but if a brick dropped and broke into grit, three days of mourning had to be observed.'

Just before noon we had to queue up to receive our daily ‘soup'. We ate without spoons, four starving men to one plate, nervously watching each other's lips, tearing the
plate from each other's hands, while the sons of the Master Race amused themselves by taking photographs.

 

 
Block 8
 

Prior to our life in camp we all had our idiosyncratic features, faces of our inner being, talismans of our childhood homes. But here, such characteristics quickly vanished, to be absorbed by the common depraved existence we were forced to endure. Yet I admired how my new friend Raymond, in some inexplicable way, though uncertain like most of us of another tomorrow, could retain a real measure of decency, of civility. I cannot remember him pushing or in any way abusing anyone; in moments of maltreatment by a fellow prisoner, he never resorted to curses or foul language, but rather to wit — a light sarcasm that often calmed down the offender.

He also had a habit of paraphrasing the scriptures to fit the occasion. On our way to roll-call one morning in mid-September, it was Lamentations:

Our enemies are now the masters,

Our foes are at ease,

Because the Lord has afflicted us.

For what transgression?

The SS
Blockführer
had ordered Romek to relocate half of Block 5 into Block 8. To our great relief, Raymond and I were both assigned to the new barrack. Was it Romek's
anti-Fascist tattoo which prompted him not to separate us? I can never know, of course, but I like to imagine that it was. There are times when we desperately need imagination to pierce the darkest dark with a sliver of light.

I cannot remember the name of our new block-eldest, but I can vividly recall his physical features. Tall, perhaps a six-footer, with a round snow-white face and a well-trimmed ginger toothbrush moustache under his long, red, carrot-shaped nose. Although he spoke German, no one knew exactly where he came from. The rumour went that in 1930 he had been sentenced for rape and murder, and would probably have spent his life behind bars if history had not dealt him a lucky hand. For with the election of Schickl-gruber as Chancellor of Germany, and the Nazis' dire need for a new army of educators, the godsend of Auschwitz threw open the gates of his prison.

Inmates who had the misfortune to be invited to this
Blockälteste
's candle-lit cubicle spoke with horror of his nocturnal urges, the blows and abuse they were forced to endure from this new educator, whose wall was painted sky-blue and adorned with the meaningful injunction:
ACHTE DEM FORTGESETZTEN!
Respect Your Superior!

Rysiek, our
Stubendienst
(or room-orderly, appointed by the block-eldest), was a country boy from a village that lay close to my city of the waterless river. He had a strong, wiry physique, a head that was almost square, and no neck. Rysiek was our block-eldest's favourite, not only because of his uncanny ability to foment hatred among us inmates, and not just because he had a pair of fists like steel and didn't need to hit his victim twice, but also because he was
something of a rhymester! All day long, he made us carry huge slabs of soil from A to B, and then from B to A, while he stood akimbo on a little mound and kept a stern eye on his choir. Woe to the man who had his mouth shut when ordered to sing Rysiek's compositions:

Morning coffee, evening coffee,

This is our daily muck;

From such grub our pricks go limp,

Mother whore, what a fuck!

Raymond said that Rysiek's verses confirmed an old theory of the affinity between landscape and creativity, of the reciprocity between language and environment. As in Auschwitz at large, so in Rysiek's every word the battle for human dignity died a daily death.

Block 8 comprised 75 percent Hungarian and 25 percent Polish Jews. The Hungarians, most of whom had arrived here in 1944, did not experience the deprivations that had befallen the Polish Jews from the very first day of the war. They still looked relatively fit, and perhaps on that account were delegated the most coveted job in Block 8: dishing out the soup and dividing up the bread. Most Hungarians in this barrack hailed from small towns; they practically knew one another. This led to a blatant favouritism, especially when it came to the soup and bread. After a few heated arguments, we picked two of our more mature men to confront the one who had taken it upon himself to be spokesman of the Hungarians in our block. He was known as Józsi Bácsi (Uncle Joseph), a small volatile man of unbounded energy who
spent most of his time in the company of three young larrikins, Feri, Laci and Eli. Our delegates approached him and started to speak of our common calamity. Józsi responded with one sentence: ‘
Baszd meg, te lengyel zsidó!
' (Get fucked, Polish Jew!)