Prisoner B-3087 (5 page)

I was still working at the tailor shop in Kraków,
hoping that would save me from the Deportations.
But my work there ended up being the reason I was
taken. The tailor shop at Plaszów, a nearby labor camp,
needed more workers, we were told. So we were taken.

I had known his day would come. In the days and
weeks after my parents were deported, the rest of my
family had gone too. Uncle Moshe had disappeared
while on a work detail. Uncle Abraham and Aunt Fela
were pulled from their home in a Deportation. Cousin
Sala, Dawid, and their two boys while in line for bread.
Aunt Gizela and little Zytka went for a voluntary
selection in Zgody Square, in hopes that the Nazis
meant what they said about resettlement. By the summer of 1942, only I remained— the sole member of
my family left in the Kraków ghetto. I thought I’d be
ready for it when they took me away, but I wasn’t.

They loaded us into a truck, and all the horror stories
I’d heard suddenly became real to me. Were the Nazis
lying to us? Were we going to die? Were we really being
taken to the woods to be shot? I panicked, looking for
a way out— out of the truck, out of Plaszów, out of
this nightmare that had already swallowed my parents
and everyone I loved. But just outside the truck were
Nazis with machine guns. They didn’t even have to
point them at me for the message to be clear: It was
either go where this truck was taking me or die here on
the streets of Kraków. I had sworn to myself I would
survive, so I made the choice that kept me alive, if only
for the moment, and took a seat on the truck.

The women I worked with begged to be able to tell
their families back in the ghetto good-bye, to tell them
where they were being taken, but the Nazis didn’t listen. They just poked them with their rifles and
threatened to shoot them if they didn’t get in the truck.
The women sobbed the whole way to Plaszów, but I
didn’t. I was gripped by fear, but I wasn’t sad to leave
the ghetto. All my family were gone, and I had no
more possessions of any value. There was nothing left
for me there.

The truck did, after all, take us to Plaszów. It was a
labor camp just a few kilometers outside Kraków. The
truck stopped just outside the camp’s gate, where more
Jews were being unloaded from trucks. I didn’t know
where the others had come from: Kraków? One of the
villages outside the city? Somewhere else? Some of them
carried suitcases and bags; others, like us, had nothing.

“Schnell! Schnell!”
a German soldier barked at me.
Quickly! Quickly! He struck me in the back with the
butt of his rifle, and I stumbled forward into the dirt.
I scraped the skin off my palms trying to catch myself,
but that was nothing compared to the screaming pain
in my shoulder. I got to my feet and brushed the grit
from my bleeding hands as we were herded inside.

Plaszów was a series of long, low buildings separated by dirt roads and surrounded by barbed wire.
The few other men and I separated from the women.
A guard ordered us to turn over any valuables, and I
gave him the few zloty I had in my pockets. After that
we were ordered to take off our clothes. Reluctantly, I
removed my dirty, too-short shirt and pants, and
added them to a pile. Another soldier gave me a pair of
wooden shoes and a blue-and gray-striped prisoner
uniform made out of a thick canvas material. I put
them on and held my arms out to look at myself in my
new clothes.

Now I am officially a prisoner,
I thought. I almost
laughed— in truth I had been a prisoner since the
Nazis walled off the Kraków ghetto, but now I finally
looked the part.

After we were all given uniforms, we were marched
to the Plaszów tailor shop by another prisoner wearing a yellow armband. He was a
kapo
, he told us, a
prisoner who’d been put in charge of other prisoners
by the Nazis, so they wouldn’t have to deal with us all
the time. We were to do what he told us, he said, or we
would feel the sting of the wooden club he carried. All
of us knew enough by now to follow along and do
what we were told without speaking.

There were thousands of prisoners at Plaszów, most
wearing a yellow Star of David on their uniforms to
show they were Jews. But there were other prisoners
too, I soon learned, all of whom wore different colored triangles. The red armbands belonged to political
prisoners. Green meant criminals. Black armbands
were worn by gypsies, though there were very few of
those, as they were usually killed straight off. Purple
meant Jehovah’s Witness. Homosexuals wore pink.
And all of them had a little letter in their triangle to
tell you where they were from:
P
meant
Polen
, or
“Pole”;
T
meant
Tschechen
, or “Czech”;
J
meant
Jugoslawen
, or “Yugoslavian.” There was no letter in
the Jewish stars though. No matter where we had
come from, we had no country. We were only Jews.

As I scanned the prisoners along the way to the tailor shop, I thought I saw a familiar face. I couldn’t
believe my eyes. It was Uncle Moshe!

“Uncle Moshe!” I called. “Uncle Moshe! It’s me!
Yanek!”
Moshe looked up not in excitement, but in horror.
His eyes were wide, and he shook his head at me
quickly before turning his gaze back to the ground.
“Who called there? Who was that?” our
kapo
barked, bringing my group to a halt. The prisoners
looked back over their shoulders to show it hadn’t
been them, and I looked back too, as though trying to
see who had called out. One of the men behind me
gave me an angry glare, then turned as if to see if he
could find the source of the yell behind
him
.
“The prisoners will remain silent unless spoken to,”
the
kapo
told us, and he struck a man in the back with
his club. As the
kapo
herded us the rest of the way to
the tailor shop, I felt my throat burn with shame. I was
such a fool! Someone had been hurt because I’d called
out to Moshe. I resolved then and there not to speak
again until I could find Moshe and talk to him
privately.
We worked all day in the tailor shop doing what we
had done in Plaszów, only now there were more SS
guards, and we were often beaten for no other reason
than because we were Jews. I saw one man struck so
hard in the head with a club that he fell off his stool
and didn’t get up again. He was dragged away and
never returned, and suddenly I understood why the
Plaszów tailor shop needed new workers, and always
would.
That night we were marched to our barracks, where
we were each given a small piece of bread and a bowl
of watery soup. I was just finishing my meager meal
when Uncle Moshe found me.
“Yanek!” he said. He glanced around to make sure
our barrack
kapo
was gone, then pulled me into a hug.
I hadn’t hugged someone in so long that I was almost
too stunned to embrace him back. Moshe held me
away from him to look me over, then pulled me close
again. “I’m sorry I couldn’t greet you this morning,
but no doubt you’ve seen what they do to anyone who
speaks out of turn.”
I nodded.
“Yanek, we haven’t much time,” he whispered.
“Listen closely. Here at Plaszów, you must do nothing
to stand out. From now on, you have no name, no personality, no family, no friends. Do you understand?
Nothing to identify you, nothing to care about. Not if
you want to survive. You must be anonymous to these
monsters. Give your name to no one. Keep it secret, in
here,” Uncle Moshe said, tapping his heart with his fist.
“Are my parents here?” I asked him, daring to hope.
If Moshe was alive, why not my mother and father?
Moshe shook his head. “I am sorry, boy. No. Unless
they were taken to another work camp, they are most
likely dead — and Plaszów is where they bring most of
us from Kraków, being so close.”
My legs felt wobbly. I had to sit down on my bunk,
or I would have collapsed. I had known my parents
might be dead— there were the rumors, after all,
about where people went when they were taken. But I
suppose I’d never let myself really and truly believe it
until now. I didn’t try to stop the tears that filled my
eyes and coursed down my cheeks.
Moshe sat beside me and put a hand on my knee.
“But
you
are alive, boy! There is a blessing in that.
You’re the only other one of us to survive.”
I suddenly realized what Moshe was saying. “Aunt
Gizela? Little Zytka?” I asked— his wife and
daughter.
Moshe’s own eyes teared up, and he quickly wiped
them with the backs of his hands. “Dead,” he said.
“They could not work, so the Nazis shot them.”
I asked about my other uncles and cousins, but
Moshe shook his head. “You and I are the only ones
left. You must show them you can work, boy, so you
can keep living.”
“I have a job in the tailor shop,” I said, sniffling.
“Good. Good! Any job you can do outside the
camp will help you avoid Amon Goeth.”
“Who?”
“The commandant of the camp.”
Outside, someone shouted.
“Roll call,” Moshe said, and he stood. “We must all
go and line up to be counted. Remember: You are no
one. You have no name. You do not speak, you do not
look at them, you do not volunteer for anything. You
work, but not so hard they notice you. Gizela. Zytka.
Your parents, Oskar and Mina. They are dead and
gone now, Yanek, and we would grieve for them if we
could. But we have only one purpose now:
survive
.
Survive at all costs, Yanek. We cannot let these monsters tear us from the pages of the world.”
I nodded, wiping away my own tears, and followed
Moshe to the open field in the camp where roll call
was taken. We were lined up in row upon row while
the Nazis checked the numbers on our uniforms
against the tally on their clipboards. I realized then:
They would beat us and starve us and shoot us like we
didn’t matter, but they would always keep track of us.
While soldiers worked their ways up and down the
lines checking us off, one man in a crisp SS officer’s
uniform and tall riding boots walked among the prisoners, twitching a riding crop against his legs. Two
sturdy-looking German shepherd dogs followed along
behind him. The SS officer stopped in front of the
prisoner beside me and suddenly commanded his
dogs, “Attack! Attack! Kill the Jew!”
The two dogs were calm as pets one moment. In the
next instant, they became rabid killers. They leaped at
the man and took him down in their jaws. The man
screamed for mercy and then for help as the dogs bit
and tore at him right beside me. I
wanted
to help, to
fight back. But Moshe glanced back at me with a warning in his eyes, and I remembered — I was no one. I had
no name. They must not notice me. So I stared straight
ahead at the ground, just like everyone else, silent and
still as the man beside me was ripped apart. When he
stopped moving and stopped crying out, the SS officer
shot the man through the head with his pistol.
That was how I was introduced to Commandant
Amon Goeth .
Goeth looked into our faces, daring one of us to
react, then walked away laughing.
When roll call ended, Moshe went to his barrack
and I went to mine. The man beside me hadn’t been
the only man to die at roll call— another was shot,
supposedly for not smacking his cap against his leg
with enough snap when doffing it for one of the soldiers. I felt as though I had survived a battle.
“What’s that make the score?” I heard someone ask.
It was one of the men who had already been in the
camp before I arrived.
“Goeth seven, Jews nil,” another man told him.
“What’s that?” I asked. “How many Jews Goeth
has killed since you’ve been here?”
“No,” the man said. “How many Jews Goeth has
killed today.”