The Dentist Of Auschwitz (21 page)

“I doubt it,” he said. Then he went on to tell me that we were now in Stammlager, the main camp of Auschwitz. He also said that there were many satellite camps around Auschwitz. “Buna, Trzebinia, Jawizowiec, Janinagrube, and Günthergrube, just to mention a few,” he said. “Their organization will amaze you.”

He stopped talking, but I wanted to know more. He answered my questions readily. “What is that number you have on your arm?”

“Everyone is known by a number here. You will get one too, and then,” he said, “you’ll be known only by a number. You’ll have to remember it and respond to it when you’re called.”

I saw his number was tattooed. “Where do we get those numbers tattooed?” I asked.

“You will see where. You’ll be tattooed as soon as you leave here.” Then he told me that he had been in Auschwitz for a year and a half.

“How long can one survive here?” I wondered aloud. That question puzzled him.

“Auschwitz is a much different place now than it was when I came here,” he said. “When we first arrived here, one sign read, ‘You can expect to survive three months here, at most six. And if you don’t like it, go to the fence and end it now.’” That confirmed my suspicions that deadly electricity did indeed flow in the inner fence of Auschwitz. He continued explaining that obeying was an inmate’s unalterable duty. “Remember, never walk in Auschwitz. Run.” He then urged me to learn the names of the SS rankings and use them correctly. “When you pass SS men, take your cap off and walk in military steps. Play by those rules regardless how ridiculous they may seem to you.” Throughout it all he kept repeating to me how lucky we were. “At times you have to have luck here,” he said. “Another reason that many of you passed the selection was because there were no women, children, or elderly among you.” I knew he had survived eighteen months in Auschwitz, and that left me with a bit of hope. His final comments to me were “No matter how sick you are, never go to the infirmary. Working is the best recipe for not dying.”

I then knew a lot more about Auschwitz and its special lingo. KZ meant concentration camp. KB (
Krankenbau
) was the infirmary. Kanada referred to the inmate groups that were gathering everything the arrivals were forced to leave on the platforms. The Kapos were inmate foremen. Bunker was a penal place. Sonderkommandos were inmates assigned to special work details. The barber, though, had dropped words that seemed strange:
horse,
rack,
and others whose meanings I could not fully understand.

Naked and shaved from tip to toe, we followed one another into the next barracks. Pairs of clogs, jackets, and pants were thrown at us, regardless of the size or fit. “If these don’t fit you, swap with others,” the inmates behind the counters told us. The clothing reeked of the very same brew that we had been sprayed with earlier. We each received gray-striped underwear and a striped beret. The jackets were either too large or too small, and most of the pants pulled up to the chin. Papa, who had never been without a thread and needle, was helpless, for the button that was supposed to hold up his pants was missing. Josek’s trousers didn’t stay on his waist either. Robbing us of our names was a way to complete our dehumanization. Our names became numbers. In time we knew why. Numbers had no faces. They were much easier to deal with.

When the numbering process began, Josek, Papa, and I followed one another and received consecutive numbers. We thought that this would lessen the chance of our being separated. A prisoner with a tool similar to a fountain pen began to inject a black dye into my lower left arm. At first it wasn’t painful, but as he progressed, it hurt. When I pulled my arm away, I saw a few drops of blood over the numbers he had just tattooed. He looked at me, and I knew he had to finish. Afterward we received cloth patches with our numbers and were told to sew them onto our jackets and pants. I became number 141129, my father number 141130, and Josek number 141131. The red triangle on the patch denoted a political crime. Three yellow corners were added to all patches of Jewish inmates. In time we learned even to distinguish what the alleged crime had been. Communists and former fighters of the Spanish Civil War who fought for a republic and against General Franco had a triangle pointing down, while the remaining political inmates had triangles pointing up. Green triangles denoted criminals, pink represented homosexuals, and purple stood for Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Brown designated the gypsies. Those alleged to be escapees wore large black circles on their backs. Because a Jew was simply shot or hanged when caught escaping, there were no Jews among this last group. The first letter of one’s country name in German—for example,
D
for Deutschland,
F
for Frankreich, and
P
for Polen—appeared in the center of the patch.

The Kapos were the ones we learned to fear first. Some were in charge of the blocks in camp. Others went with us to work and were in charge of us there. Nearly all were non-Jews, and most were German. They came from a wide variety of backgrounds: they were con men, desperados, convicted murderers, and petty criminals. Among them were also former soldiers from the International Legion. Though some of them had first been at odds with Hitler, they changed their allegiance when given the opportunity to leave the jails and become Kapos in concentration camps. All showed a certain contempt for newcomers and acted as if all Jews were their enemies. Although they faced the same life that we did, they seemed to us arrogant and harshly indifferent.

It was amazing how the Nazis had singled us out from the rest of the inmates. If there had ever been a thread of harmony between Jews and non-Jews in the camps, we did not see it in Auschwitz. In spite of our common plight, the others didn’t associate with us. They did not have to fear selections. The gas chambers were purely for Jews and gypsies.

In assembling this time, we had to follow our numbers in consecutive order. “Los! Los!” the guards herded us through Auschwitz. We saw a group of inmates carrying stones in one direction and another doing the same going the opposite way. They looked toward us, but I was not sure that they could see us. Finally we came to the Quarantine Block. We had not eaten in two days and thought that having passed Auschwitz’s symbolic baptism, our fellow inmates would find enough compassion for us to let us into the building. But the Kapo and three of his assistants marched us to the side of the building. There they chilled us with an unfriendly reception.

“Where were you all this time?” the Kapo growled. He sounded as if he was accusing us of not having come to Auschwitz sooner. Next the clerk checked to see if we were all there. He was tall, about two meters, skinny and bowlegged. He wore a red triangle with a capital
P,
which made him a political prisoner from Poland. His tattooed number was a little over 100000. One of his ears curled upward, and the other looked as if it was folded back. Of the three assistants to the Kapo in that block, he turned out to be the friendliest and the most decent.

In a hoarse, quivering voice, he encouraged us to be hopeful. “You will probably be sent to an Aussenlager [subcamp], of which there are thirty-nine here in a forty-kilometer radius.” After two weeks, barring any problems, he said, we could expect to be sent out to work.

The Kapo, however, was different. When he began to speak, he demonstrated how, in Auschwitz, men became more aggressive than animals. He looked well-nourished. He laid down the rules. “Anyone who leaves this block will receive ten lashes. If anyone brings food in the barracks, ten lashes. If you leave your bunk unmade, ten lashes. Missing at a roll call, ten lashes. Stealing, twenty lashes.” By the end of his tirade, we were numb with rules.

As noon neared, it was time to fetch food, and he allowed us to go into the rooms. Our pants were still loose. If we couldn’t find something to keep them up, we knew we would get scolded by the Kapo. Luckily Josek had found a bit of string. Once we were in the barracks we quickly secured three adjacent bunks. For the first time since we became camp inmates, we were in a vermin-free block.

In both Steineck and Gutenbrunn we got our rations regularly. Here, however, even though we received soup morning and night, we got bread sporadically. Since no one could venture beyond the block, stealing was out of the question. Even Mendele, who had nearly always found ways to circumvent the system, had trouble. When the block orderly arrived with vats of soup, we each received two ladles of boiled water with bits of potatoes and an overcooked turnip in it. We had no spoons and had to drink from the bowl.

The roll call could last hours. One Sunday, just before noon, I heard my name being called. I didn’t recognize who it was. I wondered how anyone would know my name. When I came to the door, I saw a Kapo. I didn’t know why he was looking for me. After confirming that I was Bronek Jakubowicz and from Gutenbrunn, he said there was a girl outside who had asked him if he knew a Bronek Jakubowicz. After he described her briefly, I knew it could only be Zosia.

He said he had advised her to leave, after promising her that he would find me. I was curious to know how the Kapo had found me. “She told me when and from where you came, and I knew, if you were alive, you could only be here in the Quarantine Block,” he said. He considered his mission completed and left. Our class distinction was such that it would have been too demeaning for him to stay and socialize with an ordinary inmate who had just come to Auschwitz. How Zosia knew where we had been sent I have never learned. Considering the extraordinarily tight security at Auschwitz, which would have discouraged her from coming back, she must have realized that she could not have met me even if she did return. What came back were my memories of our days together at Steineck and Gutenbrunn.

The Auschwitz veterans looked upon us as greenhorns. They answered all of our questions with questions of their own. When I asked a Kapo’s aide where I could wash some of my clothes, he answered, “Where do you think you are, in a sanitorium?”

More people kept coming. We saw tattooed numbers upward of 150000. That meant that almost ten thousand people had been brought here since we had come. According to the normal pattern, only 25 percent actually passed into the camp. That meant that in the two weeks since we arrived, more than forty thousand people had been transported to Auschwitz. I wondered about the women’s camp and the fate of Balcia and all the others.

One day a few civilian Germans, accompanied by SS men, came and looked us over. Our good-worker status, however, was apparently not known to them, and our isolation continued. We heard of Allied forces landing somewhere in Europe. One day late in the afternoon, twelve inmates went past our barracks. Usually inmates inside the camp were escorted by the Kapos, but these men were led by the SS. Their faces exuded fear. One of our room orderlies said that they were being taken to the
Strafbunker
(penalty bunker). “Few survive a long stay there,” he said. “And if they do, they’re physically and mentally broken for life.” The Strafbunker had no light or toilet. It was barely big enough for one person to stand up in. “They would have been better off to have gone to the electric fence,” the orderly said.

Another day we heard that there was no further need for inmate workers and we weren’t to go anywhere. This was the worst news we could have been told. Being unneeded meant being dispensable. Passing Dr. Mengele’s selection was just a temporary reprieve, we thought. We already knew that to remain alive we had to keep working. Being idle beyond a certain point was a threat to our lives. I was no longer optimistic that we would ever leave Auschwitz alive. After the years of living on the edge of existence, we were resigned to whatever fate had in store for us, and we didn’t look at our lives in any long-term way.

One day the Kapo kept us outside in the cold rain for more than an hour. When we finally got back into the block, we were dripping wet. We hung our clothes around the room to dry. When the Kapo noticed, he asked us who had had that idea. Since we all did it simultaneously, no one admitted guilt. Then he ordered us to go outside naked and circle the block. As we passed by him standing at the door, he swung his whip at us. Mendele was hit badly, but even though some lashes on his back drew blood, he didn’t whimper. I thought this teenager’s heart was made of stone. Looking around and seeing the rain dripping off of us, I thought of cattle in a pasture. Here we were treated alike, driven, herded, and even branded like cattle. Later one of the prisoners, Moishe Chernicki, came down with a fever and was taken to the infirmary. No one ever saw or heard from him again.

We had been in this isolation for more than two weeks. The draconian rations barely kept us alive. When the sun didn’t shine, the camp was draped in the black of the rising smoke. There had not been a shortage of courage before, but now we were at our lowest point ever. Reality seemed twisted and out of shape. At times we stared into space. Some wandered around the barracks in loneliness. Although we had passed Dr. Mengele’s selection, we were destined to flunk life anyway. Suicides, though, were rarely heard of here. Only a few Jewish inmates succumbed in this way. Perhaps our generation’s experiences had endowed us with extra ability to endure. The undaunted believers still prayed every day. It amazed me how they still remembered word-for-word the various prayers of shaharith, minhah, and maarib—the morning, afternoon, and evening liturgies.

Then a number of civilians came to the block. They were accompanied by Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz. The consensus of our block supervisors indicated that they were from I.G. Farben, a large German pharmaceutical company that already employed prisoners in the nearby Buna camp. At Buna, the I.G. Farben Company was making synthetic rubber. There, we were told, the inmate death rate was very high, and they had a continuous need for replacement workers. We believed that it could only be better than our present situation. We just wanted to get out of here.

Finally we got orders that we would leave the camp. A little after five the next morning, we were each given leather shoes with wooden soles to replace our clogs. After roll call we were given a generous portion of bread and were lined up. There were eight hundred of us who would be workers and twenty-five other prisoners, including Richard Grimm, who would take charge of us. We did not know where we were going. Except for Grimm, all the others had low prisoner numbers. The lowest I recall seeing was on Klaus Koch, who became our cook. Coincidentally, an SS man by the same name turned out to be his boss. Most of the workers wore green triangles, the color designated for criminals, but there were also political prisoners and even one homosexual bearing a pink triangle patch.