Scheisshaus Luck (11 page)

‘‘From the box in the corner get me two transformers, one for 68

SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

two hundred and fifty volts to one hundred and twenty volts and another for eighteen volts.’’

When I came back with the right transformers, the
Vorarbeiter
seemed satisfied that he could depend on me not to screw up.

As we prepared the wiring for a new building that morning, I was amazed by the jovial mood of my co-workers. On their faces were the first smiles I had seen since my arrival. It was a startling contrast to the gloom that hung over
Kommando
136. Then, again, it’s hard to smile when your face is frozen. At lunch I discovered one reason these slave laborers seemed not to mind their work.

Their soup was a much thicker and tastier fare than anything I had eaten so far. They all laughed when I licked my bowl.

‘‘
Speckja¨ger, haben einen Nachschlag
’’ (Bacon hunter, have a second helping), grinned the
Kapo
.

‘‘May I really?’’

‘‘Have two; there’s plenty left.’’

No wonder there wasn’t a sickly skeleton in the bunch. Relatively speaking, I was in paradise.

At the end of the day, the
Kapo
handed me a small industrial fuse the likes of which I had never seen before.

‘‘Is it any good?’’ he asked.

I looked through the glass of the porcelain fuse.

‘‘Sure,’’ I said confidently.

‘‘Check it again. You see those little black specks? This fuse has a manufacturing defect. It blew the moment we screwed it in the socket. You’re not very observant. We would’ve wasted a day searching for an open line.’’

That damn fuse sank me. The next day I was back shivering my nuts off with
Kommando
136.

♦ ♦ ♦

It was early evening. The north wind had frozen everything that the pale winter sun had thawed, making our usual path back to PART II | AUSCHWITZ

69

camp a sheet of ice. By threes, we walked on one of the many tenta-cles of train track criss-crossing the Buna plant. Ice splinters falling from the electric wires overhead stung my face. The wind cut through my ‘‘pajamas’’—camp slang for our striped uniforms—

chilling my bones, which hardly had any meat left on them. As usual my stomach was throbbing with hunger, but it had been such an exceptionally exhausting day of fitting panels of cement and sea-weed up onto the skeletal frame of another warehouse building that all I wanted was my infested straw mattress. I hoped they wouldn’t make us take a shower when we returned to our
Block
. There was no way my feeble legs could carry my wet, naked body fast enough across the one hundred yards of frozen cinders that lay between the showers and our
Block
. It would be a sure way of catching pneumonia.

I heard bells, and turned to see two Polish peasants, bundled in warm furs and smoking pipes, passing by on a sleigh. They were probably on their way back from picking up the garbage at the civilian kitchen. The short longhaired horses pulling them trotted with heads down, noses steaming, and tails whipping in the wind. It reminded me of the illustrations in my mother’s copy of Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
. I looked at the
Ha¨ftlinge
ahead of me. No holiday picture here. The dragging gray line of misery was more akin to the painting of Napoleon’s retreat across the Berezina River. Our K
apo
Hans strutted in his high polished boots with his new
Piepel
(‘‘er-rand boy’’) by his side. It had been no surprise that Hans had dumped his former
Piepel
, a deformed little beggar, when this fourteen-year-old Dutch kid with big green eyes arrived in the camp.

Hans held the boy by the arm as we took a shortcut along a cluster of butane tanks and twisting pipelines with safety valves that let off jets of steam that smelled like cider. He then put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and let it slip down his back, affectionately squeezing his waist. The
Piepel
stepped away, glancing at Hans with guileless eyes and a smile. What innocence, I thought. You don’t understand at all, do you, kid? Yes, Hans is fond of you, but not in the way you think. I’m sure you feel lucky that you don’t have to 70

SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

work like the rest of us, but soon enough you’ll learn the price.

Hans will take you to a secluded spot while we work. The
Vorarbeiter
will ensure that his
Kapo
isn’t interrupted.

Like a father, Hans will sit you tenderly on his lap. Panting with excitement, he’ll whisper in your ear all that he can do for you. His hands will press your body. Your few carelessly sewn buttons will pop off. While he holds you with one strong arm, he’ll wet your bottom with his saliva, and before you realize what’s happening, you’ll feel your intestines being pushed through your stomach. I would like to open your eyes, you beardless boy, but truly—what business is it of mine? Don’t I have enough troubles of my own?

Perhaps this will be the only way you will get out of here alive. I stumble, almost crashing to the frozen ground. I mind other people’s business, but I can barely stand on my own two feet, I scolded myself.

Of course, things turned out a little differently from what I had imagined. On the day of our shower, Hans joined us instead of taking a shower on Sunday morning with the other
Kapos
and
Blocka¨lstesters
. He stood beside his
Piepel
, devouring him with his eyes.

The couple was given a wide berth. Hans didn’t even try to cover his excitement. He had brought along a blue-and-white checked towel, a luxury unknown to any ordinary
Ha¨ftling
, and handed it to the boy while the rest of us returned to the
Block,
wet and naked.

That night I was awakened by a low voice. I was sleeping on the second tier. Above me was a Russian snoring like a sawmill, and below me was the
Piepel
. I peeked down. Hans was crouching next to the bunk.

‘‘Shh!’’ he ordered his
Piepel
.

The bunk creaked when Hans crawled in. I closed my eyes and tried not to care. The boy started sobbing softly. I thought, don’t worry, kid, it will stretch. All three tiers began to sway. Hans was doing him from the side. The SS really needed to switch the color of his triangle.

The Russian’s snoring became irregular as the bunks quaked and Hans panted. I looked at the bunk above me and hoped that PART II | AUSCHWITZ

71

the Russian wasn’t prone to seasickness. If he is, he’s going to vomit all over me.

The boy’s eyes were deadened from that morning on, and soon after he contracted pneumonia. Hans went on the hunt for a new
Piepel
and the fourteen-year-old died alone in the HKB.

Not long after, I found myself with a suitor.

My
Kommando
was doing odd jobs, laying bricks, hammering spikes into train track tie plates, and tightening track bolts. I was crouched on what would be the base for a railroad track switch, chiseling a gully in the cement for the rod that connected the switch handle to track that hadn’t yet been laid. It was lucky for me that the cement hadn’t completely cured.

A
Kapo
, whose
Kommando
was laying electrical cable in freshly dug trenches, had been staring at me for a while. I told myself that he was just suspicious, since I was so far from the other members of my
Kommando
. But didn’t he have enough ‘‘pajamas’’ of his own to watch over? Suddenly he was standing next to me. With chisel in hand, I got up on tingling legs.

‘‘Boy, look at your shirt. It’s filthy,’’ he said.

How observant. I had worked and slept in it for over a month.

‘‘I’ll give you a new one.’’ Give me? I knew it wasn’t my lucky day. What did he want?

‘‘Let’s get out of the wind.’’

The
Kapo
grabbed me by the arm and led me to a secluded area between two buildings. ‘‘Take that off.’’

He indicated to the scrap of cement bag I had wrapped around my left hand to prevent my skin from sticking to the steel chisel. I did as I was told. The
Kapo
held my hands.

‘‘Young man, rub your hands before you get frostbite.’’

Again, I did as I was told. A moment later he held my hands again.

‘‘That’s better,’’ he said, and opened his coat, revealing an erection poking out of his unbuttoned fly.

I had seen this coming, but I was surprised that in this weather he could get his battery charged just by looking at me. He pulled 72

SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

me close and had me touch his erection. I had no choice if I wanted to walk back to that slab of concrete.

I stroked his stubby prick with a droopy foreskin while he moved his ass rhythmically. He was breathing heavily, and I could hear his heart dancing the conga. I hoped to get it over with before the
Kapo
decided he wanted to be satisfied in a different manner.

Finally his knees buckled, he grunted, and ejaculated.

With a grin and a kick he buried the evidence in the sandy soil, turned on his heels, and returned to his
Kommando
. There goes my shirt, I thought as I picked up my chisel. Well, I wasn’t really expecting one anyhow.

That asshole Hans. Being too old for his taste, Hans had pimped me. It was no accident that he put me on that slab of concrete. Maybe he got the shirt. Then again, it could have all just been shithouse luck.

I went back to work and made sure the job was finished before they lined us up for the march back to camp. I wasn’t going to make a second ‘‘date’’ easy for that
Kapo
. I didn’t see him the next day or the day after that. When I finally did spot him he seemed just as uninterested in me as I was in him, but it still took me weeks to stop looking over my shoulder for him while I worked. It was a pittance compared to the price Han’s fourteen-year-old paid.

♦ ♦ ♦

One of the nice things about my life in Drancy, other than Stella, was the fact that I could get cigarettes regularly. This was a big deal for an eighteen-year-old who had started smoking at age ten by making cigarettes with the tobacco from his father’s cigar butts.

Unfortunately, cigarettes were nearly impossible to get in Monowitz, so I joined up with four other
Ha¨ftlinge
from my
Block
who also had a strong need for tobacco smoke in their lungs. Every morning one of us would make a trade with a Russian black triangle: the margarine that we received with our bread and coffee for a pinch of coarse Russian
makhorka
(tobacco stems). Since the stems pierced PART II | AUSCHWITZ

73

newspaper, we rolled it in squares cut from the middle layer of the triple-lined cement bags that we ‘‘organized’’ from the plant’s construction sites.

Once rolled, the five of us hurried behind the
Blocks
before morning assembly. The one who traded his margarine got the first puff. He would then exhale the smoke into the mouth of the next man, who would exhale into the mouth next to him. Once the fifth man got his, the cigarette would be passed to the second man and he would inhale and the smoke was passed around again. The cigarette lasted long enough for everyone to get one drag from it.

Exhaling into one another’s mouth was about the unhealthiest thing we could be doing in the middle of winter. When the yellow triangle Czech and red triangle Serb showed up with nasty coughs, we just took our one drag from the cigarette. Still the third, fourth, and fifth men were taking in a lot of germs. Twenty-one days and twenty-one cigarettes later, we wisely dissolved our smoking circle after we all started hacking up phlegm.

In March, I befriended a new arrival, a nineteen-year-old yellow triangle from Holland who was in my
Block
and
Kommando
. Peter was tall and unusually skinny for a new arrival. He was lucky that I.G. Farben was demanding more manpower for the Buna plant.

He would have been directed to the left if he had arrived with me.

Peter had been shipped in with his father, whom he missed terribly.

During our lunch break one frosty day I asked him where he had learned to speak fluent German, and without a Dutch accent.

‘‘I’m a German Catholic from Cologne.’’

‘‘Then how come you wear a yellow triangle?’’

‘‘My father is Jewish. Eight years ago we fled to Holland by hiding on a barge.’’

‘‘How about your mother?’’

‘‘She’s Catholic. She stayed in Cologne because everything we own is now in her name.’’

‘‘Do you miss her?’’ I pried.

‘‘Before the war she visited us a few times, but I haven’t heard 74

SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

from her since the Germans came into Holland. I worry about her because Cologne has been bombed many times.’’

I mumbled matter-of-factly, ‘‘I guess you were starving in Holland, too. You don’t look good.’’

‘‘No, we were doing okay in Groningen, but when we were discovered by the Gestapo I got a bad infection. My father told them that I’m not Jewish, but the agent screamed that a leopard doesn’t change his spots.’’

Peter bragged to me constantly about his father. It seemed that he was the owner of a prosperous factory that produced women’s corsets, and Peter believed that he had landed a good job in Auschwitz.

‘‘I’m sure they’re taking advantage of his excellent bookkeeping skills,’’ he would say time and time again.

I didn’t have the heart to inform Peter that he was living in a dream world. I assumed he used this feeble thread of hope the way I did with my thoughts of Stella, to keep the will to live strong. But amid the stories of camping trips and his father’s keen business mind, I could sense that Peter was becoming more and more dis-traught. Against my advice, he went to the
Schreibstube
and asked to be reunited with his father in the main camp.

A few days later I openly cried when he waved to me from the back of a truckful of
Muselma¨nner
. You fool, I wanted to scream.