Child of the Journey (21 page)

Misha stared as man, horse, and dog ran into and onto and over prisoners--who screamed as bones, brittle from dietary deficiencies, broke like twigs.

Dear God, let the boy stay conscious throughout the whipping, Sol prayed. As long as he counted the lashes aloud, he would get no more than those assigned. Would it be the cane whip or the horse whip? The length of flex-steel, perhaps? The immediate agony was all that differed. Whatever was used, his buttocks would become raw mincemeat. Later, Hempel would doubtlessly abuse him or, worse yet, hand him over to the guards who had a taste for gang rape. Camp gallows-humor insisted they raped because they believed that by doing so they spread the seed of National Socialism.

Sol shut his eyes.

A Kapo's stick pushed into the small of his back. "You! Filth! Into the pit with the rest of them!"

The column broke into rows and snaked downward into the cold shadows that filled the limestone quarry. Sol descended the steep steps that had been carved into the pitside, trying to imagine himself entering Persepolis or one of the Egyptian digs that had so seized the world's imagination a decade before.
 

"All right, you lazy Jew. Get those hods rolling." The slap of Pleshdimer's stick across his ribs reminded him that this was no archaeological dig. The Kapo raised his voice. "The rest of you--move yesterday's stones up the hill!" He shouted loudly enough to be heard by the guards who stood at the top of the pit, holding dogs and machine-pistols at the ready. "On with it, or tomorrow I'll be gone and someone who really knows how to teach you the value of industry will stand here in my place!"

Sol joined the rush to secure a stone that could be balanced on his back with one hand, leaving the other free in case he stumbled or fell. Stumble, and he would be forced to pitch himself sideways into a long and possibly fatal tumble down the jagged rubble that banked the steps. Fall, and he would receive an immediate beating and twenty-five lashes; fall backwards--knock down other prisoners and halt progress--and death would be the easiest punishment.

Prisoners were grouped by the color of the patches sewn onto their sleeves. Each group worked a different part of the pit.

The red-triangled politicals and green-triangled criminals usually got the best of it, breaking and shaping stones; the violet-triangled Jehovah's Witnesses and black-triangled work-dodgers and anti-socials were next in the caste system.

The prisoners the Nazis labeled the worst degenerates in the Reich, the Jews and homosexuals, were lumped together. The homosexuals wore pink triangles, the Jews yellow ones. Solomon's was crossed with a green one. His crime: defiling a German sewer.

Together, his two triangles formed a Star of David.

Like beasts of burden, the Jews and the homosexuals carried rocks to the top of the quarry, a double-dozen steps up an almost perpendicular incline. Denied medical attention during illness or following an accident, deliberate or provoked, and on half rations, the sick and the starving hauled the boulders. Up; and run down. Up; and run down--

Sol shouldered his first burden of the day. The best he could find was a shapeless rock that weighed at least forty kilos. He had become a connoisseur of weights, able to judge them with a kind of sick precision. There was a time he had weighed eighty kilos, a time his mother had bragged, "God should only make a bull's haunch so lean and tough as my Sol's." Now he guessed his weight was about fifty-five kilos. Driven by fear, he found he could carry rocks all day he would have had trouble lifting when he was in good health.

He pictured himself balanced on a scale being held not by Justice but by the Angel of Death. On the other side of the scale was a different kind of boulder, heavier and much more important: the burden every Jew had to carry.

"Move!"

The guard amused himself by hitting Sol across the shoulders with his gun--his "fat squirter," as the prisoners called the weapons--and waited impatiently, eagerly, for someone else to slow down.

Sol wavered, sucking air to replace the breath stolen from him by the unexpected blow. Only those guards circling the top of the pit around the limestone crusher occasionally missed an opportunity for cruelty, because they had the distraction of their shepherds straining against their leashes and slavering as they eyed the inmates they had been trained to hate.

Sol wondered if any of them had been bred in Erich's kennels.

Bent double by the rock, he staggered up the steps. His eardrums felt ready to burst from the interminable shouting, and his joints, not yet warmed to the task, felt cemented. Soon his bones would feel ready to crumble, and the pit's shadows would invade his lungs like a cold dark hand.
 

The hours passed in a blur of pain and fatigue.

"Sing!" Hempel ordered.

His comrades, grinning, took up the command for the camp song. "Sing, you scum!"

The column twisted, going down alongside itself like an indecisive caterpillar. The inmates running down the steps, mindful of the guards' demands, kept their knees lifted as though for a soccer drill.

"Dear old Moses, come again,"
they sang.
"Lead your Jewish fellowmen...once more to their promised land."

Sol stopped singing and put down the rock. Eyes rigidly forward, he prepared himself for the dash down the hill.

"Sing!" A guard kicked him in the shin. He reeled--and sang:

"Split once more for them the sea..."

Beyond exhaustion, he fell onto his side. Arms and legs moving spastically, he murmured the rest of the song.

"When the Jews are all inside

 
On their pathway, long and wide,

 
Shut the trap, Lord, do your best!

 
Give us the world its lasting rest!"

Arms enfolded him. Like a dying spider, he continued to move. Finally his limbs slowed and he sagged in Hans' arms. His head lolled, his mouth opened, closed. Spittle drooled down his chin.

"It's over." Hans' voice. "We're dismissed to the barracks."

Sol realized he was no longer at the quarry. "Hot roll call"-- exercising until the weak collapsed from exhaustion, and were shot--had just ended.

Later, wedged into his "Olympic" bunk, the top of five wooden tiers and so narrow that he could only slide in and remain in one position, he could not sleep. The barracks, designed for eighty and filled with three hundred, stank of the sweat and vomit of men too crammed together to rise and relieve themselves. The prisoners who had chosen to lie on the avenues of dirt floor below became receptacles for the urine and excrement that fell from above, but--too tired and weak to awaken--they did not know it until morning.

With only about forty centimeters between his bunk and the ceiling, Sol's bunk was too high up, too inaccessible to be subject to inspection like the one Misha shared with Hans Hannes--a "trap" bottom bunk. What he would give for half an hour of rest in a soft bed! Thirty minutes. The time it took to make love or put together a noodle pudding, or to kill--how many?

He thought about Misha.

The boy had not marched back with them; he had not yet come back to the barracks. Sleep, Sol told himself, knowing he would need strength when Misha returned...if he returned.

"I can't sleep either," Hans whispered, standing up.

Though not a Jew, he had requested and been granted quarters in the Jewish barracks. He wore the pink triangle of a homosexual; the guards loathed him perhaps even more than they hated the Jews and the Gypsies. He reminded the guards too much of many of their own.

Whispering so as not to disturb the others, Sol asked, "What happened to the Gypsies who arrived yesterday from Burgenland?"

"They had some kind of infectious eye disease. I heard they were taken to the hospital in Jena. You should tell them about your eyes, Solomon. It might be your way out of here."

"The politicals occasionally get emigration papers," Sol said. "The only way out for the rest of us is feet first." He thought about Carl von Ossetzky, released when he won the Nobel Prize for literature. What good had freedom done him? He had died anyway as the result of the torture and inhumanity he suffered here.

"At least ask them for spectacles," Hans insisted.

"I did. Before I knew what went on in the sick ward."

"Apply to the Chief Security Office in Berlin for a visitor. If they allow one, your visitor can bring you spectacles."

"Sometimes," Sol answered, "it is better not to see."

"Shush!" Hans silenced him. "They are bringing the boy back."

He disappeared. Sol scooted to the edge of his bunk. He had barely enough room to turn his head and look down.

"Did they not tell you, Misha Czisça, that death through sorrow is forbidden here?" Hans whispered. He lifted the boy in his arms and carried him to his bunk. The boy lay with his back to Hans, staring at the far wall. Now and again, despite Hans' whispered protests, he scraped his fingers along the filthy floor to take a handful of dirt and transfer it to his mouth.

Hans bent over him. He was weeping quietly. A tear, dripping from his chin, fell into Misha's hair.

"Son of a bitch!" He looked up at Solomon, his face white, his eyes red-rimmed but suddenly clear and intensely blue, as if hatred had lent them new life.

Staring at Hans, Solomon saw a fragile, empty vessel. The face of death lay beneath the mask of the man who had seemed always to possess greater stamina than any other person in the barracks.

Hans Hannes, with his humor and humanity, reminded him of Grog, the clown, for whom the world was no longer
"Schö-ö-ön."

"He can have my daily ration of bread and soup," Sol whispered, his own eyes filling with tears. "I would give him my life, if it would stop him from blaming himself for my imprisonment."

"To stop him you must live, not die," Hans said. "He told me our beloved Hauptsturmführer found it too distasteful to do the beating himself. He handed Misha over to Pleshdimer. Then Hempel salted his wounds and licked them. Licked them! The man should be locked up in the kennels with the rest of Standartenführer Koch's dogs!"

The boy's dry-eyed sobs quieted. "Is he asleep?" Solomon asked.

The actor nodded and covered Misha's limp body with a threadbare blanket. The boy awakened and tried to sit up, but fell back in pain. "The leather strap. He soaked it in brine, Hans. There were holes in it."

Gently, Hans turned the boy over. Blisters were forming where the flesh had come through the holes in the leather strap.

After Misha fell back into an exhausted sleep, Sol descended from his bunk. Together, he and Hans walked over to one of the barracks's two tiny windows.

"Punishing someone that way--for being out of step, for God's sake!" Sol asked.
"Why!"

"Why ask a fool's question, Solomon? Go to sleep. Tomorrow we go back to the quarry. You will need all your strength." He turned his back on Sol, leaned against the windowsill, and looked out.

Sol returned to his bunk and passed into a fitful sleep filled with dreams of the past months. He was on the train from Berlin, coughing and feverish from the fetid damp of the sewer. Tramping down Karacho Way into the "camp for protective custody." Stumbling through gates inscribed, "My Fatherland--right or wrong." He dreamed of a hospital bed, Dr. Schmidt bending over him, saying, "You will serve us yet for many years." And he heard laughter--not human--as the visions and the voices intruded, mocking him.

"I thought I'd be killing lice,"
he heard a voice say from one of his childhood visions.

Then another: "
Give me your axe!... You've hurt me enough, you've hurt me.

He blinked. He was in the quarry. Such an indulgence, the voices and visions, compared to what he now must endure! The weight upon his back displaced them. There was only the next step to climb, the bent back of the wretch before him, the sweat runneling down his face...and the rock. Always the rock.

Up.

Deposit the rock.

Down, singing of Jewish destruction. Up, a skin-and-bone machine whose only reality was pain so great it congealed within the flesh like pus. Certain each trip up the quarry steps would be his last, that he would drop dead and slide down the rubble to stare through vacant eyes at those too foolish to embrace the long sweet sleep of eternity.

He put down his tenth rock--or was it his ten-thousandth?--and raised his head. The other prisoners were sitting or lying about. He lay down where he had stood, savoring the cold stony ground and the feathery clouds chasing each other across the sky.

They brought sleep, and he dreamed he was dreaming...a dream within a dream....

He was a bulldog. Stocky, large, jaw square, eyes red with anger. When he awoke within the dream, the anger was still in him. He growled up at the edge of the pit, at the circle of shepherds. They disappeared. A wall of blood rose to a crescent. Curled at the edges. Began to trickle, then to pour down the hillside, meandering among the rubble, branching again and again until it reddened the limestone talus.

At the top of the pit, the shepherds returned, lifted their heads, howled at an ice-white moon.