War and Remembrance (86 page)

Swung out on the davits, the motor whaleboat loaded with wounded was so close to the water that the sailors had only to cut the falls. Balsa rafts flew over the side. Hundreds of nearly naked sailors went swarming down nets, sliding down ropes, many crossing themselves before they went. Below, there was a great sound of splashing, and those in the water cried thinly to each other and to the men on deck.

Soon they all were down in the sea. Rafts, boats, and bobbing heads drifted away on the current. In the distance the two destroyers shadowily approached. The crew’s voices carried up on the slight warm breeze — men shouting for help, blowing whistles, calling out to each other in the dark. Well, none would die by fire now, Pug thought, and few if any by water, though sharks might be a hazard. Fortunately the floating oil had not ignited.

Pug was remaining aboard with a small volunteer salvage party of sailors and one chief. Strange things happened to damaged ships. Fires could burn
out. Vagaries of flooding could even right a listing hulk. At Midway the captain of the
Yorktown
had in some embarrassment climbed back aboard his ship long after abandoning it, and if not for a submarine attack next day he might have salvaged it. Pug and his volunteers might be caught in a capsizing or a torpedoing, but if the
Northampton
stayed afloat till dawn they could rig the line for a tow.

The silence, the unprecedented filth on the vast empty deck, were strange and dreamlike. Clutching at cleats, stanchions, lifelines — for to keep his footing was becoming harder all the time — he groped his way to the forecastle to see how the towing rig preparations were coming along. Looking back at his sinking ship, he observed that his guns, arrested in the elevation of the last portside salvo, paralleled the sea, so steep was the list. Here the
Northampton
looked like her old self, except for the crazy tilt and the yellow glow that silhouetted the masts and the guns. Good-bye, then, to the
Nora-Maru!

Around abandoned hand pumps and over coiling hoses he staggered aft, amid heaps of detritus — clothes, food, cigarette wrappings, books, papers, shell cases, coffee mugs, half-eaten sandwiches, oil-soaked life jackets, shoes, boots, helmets, all in a rotten stink of garbage and excrement, for the men had been relieving themselves topside; but the prevailing smells were of burning and of oil — above all
oil, oil, oil!
The sour stench of disaster would forever, for Victor Henry, be the smell of crude petroleum.

For another hour he watched the salvage party stumble about their work, mainly pumping and fire-fighting. The sailors had to move monkey-fashion, using hands and feet on deck projections to keep from sliding on the oily plates. Firelit faces stern, mouths taut, they kept looking out to sea at the two destroyers picking up survivors. Pug at last decided, at a quarter to three, that the
Northampton
was a dead loss. Staying on any longer, he would only risk sailors’ lives to make himself look good. She might or might not float for another hour; she might also capsize with little warning.

“Chief, let’s abandon ship.”

“Aye aye,
SIR.”

At the word the sailors pitched the last large balsa raft overboard. It sailed down and struck with a loud splash. The chief, a gray-headed big-bellied man, the best machinist on the ship, urged the captain to go first. When Pug brusquely refused, the chief kicked off his shoes, stripped to oil-smeared jockey shorts, and tied his life jacket around his thick sweaty white rolls of fat. “Okay, you heard the boss man, let’s go.” He scrambled like a boy down the straight-hanging cargo net, the sailors after him.

In this last minute alone on deck, Pug tasted a bitter private savor of farewell. Going down with the ship was out of the question; in the United States Navy you saved yourself to fight another day. The other tradition was
stupid, though romantic and honorable. He could not help the war effort by drowning. Pug murmured a prayer for the dead men he was leaving in the hulk. He stripped to shorts, and drew on the gloves he had fetched from the bridge. In abandon-ship drills, he had always gone hand over hand down a dangling hawser. Aside from gratifying his petty vanity — he was agile at it — this had set many of the crew to imitating him, a useful thing. In emergencies ladders and nets might not be available when ropes were.

Rough manila slithering through his bare legs, Pug lowered himself into the black tropical sea. As he let go and splashed, the water felt good; warm as a bath and very salty. He swam through sticky gobs of petroleum to the raft, which still rode to a long painter tied to a cleat on deck. Naked sailors jammed the raft and swimmers surrounded it clinging to loops of cord.

“Chief, are all the men here?”

“Yes, Captain.”

Several sailors offered to make room for him on the raft.

“Stay where you are, the lot of you. Cast off!”

A knife flashed in the firelight. The painter fell away. The men paddled the raft from the foundering ship. Trying to wipe foul oil from his hair and face and to rinse the taste from his mouth, Victor Henry watched her sinking. Seen from below she was a grandiose spectacle, a vast black shape stretching across half the horizon in sluggish toppling agony, with one end burning like a torch. The men on the raft were chanting long wailing halloos and blowing on shrill whistles at the nearby destroyers and motorboats. A swell washed over Pug, and oil got in his eyes. He was bathing them when he heard yells of
“There she goes!”

Rearing up on his wrist cord, he saw the
Northampton
roll over and lift her dripping bow high. The fire went out, and she slid downward. The men ceased hallooing and whistling. It was so quiet on the raft that, over the lapping of the water, as the bow sank from sight, Pug heard the mournful sighing rush and roar of the vortex that swallowed his ship.

A
YELLOW
blaze lights the night sky in a different part of the world. Berel Jastrow, ankle-deep in snow outside the hideously stinking latrine blockhouse, stops in his tracks and stares at the high flare. It is the test: scheduled, postponed, rescheduled, postponed again. All week long SS bigwigs have been stomping through the puddles in the ice-cold raw cement structure, down in the enormous underground chambers and up above at the untried furnaces, their impatient brusque comments echoing to the splash and thump of boots.

The Commandant himself has been there with his frozen-faced entourage, watching civilian technicians work their heads off on twenty-four-hour shifts side by side with the shaven-headed bone-skinny inmates in their striped pajamas. Very strange they have looked in Auschwitz, these well-fed healthy outsiders with full heads of hair, wearing the almost forgotten polite costume of overcoats, trousers, jackets, ties, or else workmen’s overalls; cheerful businesslike Poles or Czechs, talking technical jargon with the German supervisors about retorts, generator gases, fire bricks, draft cross-sections, and so forth; normal fellows, doing a normal job, acting normally.

Normally, except for the way they look at the prisoners. It is as though the striped ticking gives a man the invisibility of a fairy-tale cloak. The technicians do not seem to see you. Of course they are not allowed to talk to inmates, and they fear the SS overseers. Still, not even to show, with a flicker of the eyes, that they see fellow human beings? To look through them as though they are air? To walk around them as though they are posts, or piles of bricks? A strange thing.

The high red-yellow flare at the chimney top flutters and almost dies as clouds of black smoke swirl in the fire; then it burns clear again. No mistaking what this sight is. The tall square chimney shows up plain in the smoky glow from the disposal pits out beyond. Successful test; and why not? The best German workmanship has been going into this installation, the finest machinery and equipment — generators, ovens, blowers, electric hoists, giant ventilators, novel cradles that roll on rails right into the oven mouths — all first-class. Berel has himself been working at cementing this factory-new apparatus into place. He knows quality when he sees it. German wartime shortages have not affected this job. Highest priority! Down in the
lower level, those long cavernous chambers are rough work by comparison, except for the airtight doors; excellent workmanship in those heavy doors, in the stout frames, in the double rubber gaskets.

Swinging his club, a trusty slogs by Jastrow toward the latrine, giving him an ugly look. Jastrow has his armband pinned on; rank has its privileges, he can relieve himself after dark. But armband or no, a trusty can crack you on the ass if he pleases, or for that matter smash in your skull and leave you bleeding to death in the snow, and there will be no fuss. Hurrying back to his barrack, Jastrow looks into the block chief’s room: clean comfortable digs, with German travel posters of the Rhine, the Berlin Opera, and the Oktoberfest on the plank walls.

The block chief, a tall thin horribly pimpled
Volksdeutscher
burglar from Prague, is smoking a pipe in an old wicker chair, muddy boots up on a stool. Plenty of tobacco around in the camp now; also soap, food, Swiss francs, dollars, medicine, jewelry, gold, clothes; all manner of precious things, available at great risk, at high price. The SS men and the trusties are skimming the cream, naturally, but the inmates trade also; some to eat better, some to grab profit, a daring few to implement resistance or escape. This tide of goods has been sweeping in with the Jewish transports from the west, which have been mounting in number and size month by month. During the summer typhus epidemic, all camp discipline sagged. The trickle of contraband from “Canada,” the luggage disposal barracks, became a corrupting flood. The Auschwitz black market, though a mortally dangerous racket, is now unstoppable.

The block leader blows out a sweetly fragrant gray cloud, and with a wave of his pipe dismisses Jastrow, who makes his way down the long frigid crowded blockhouse, his wooden clogs sliding in the ropy mud of the floor. Not an unendurable trusty, he thinks, this old green-triangle type from Dachau and Sachsenhausen, ready as a whore to do anything for money or luxuries except risk his neck or his job. At roll call he puts on a tough show for the SS, clubbing inmates about, but in the block he is just a lazy good-for-nothing. Now and then he messes behind his closed door with one or another of the
peipls,
the perverted boy inmates who drift through the blocks. The prisoners do not even slyly grin at that any more. Old stuff.

Many inmates are already snoring in their bunks, lying three and four to a tier like sardines. Jastrow pushes past the men roosting on the long central brick pipe which doesn’t warm the place, but slightly mitigates, together with all the body heat of the prisoners, the subzero night. All the Birkenau huts — he has worked on constructing more than a hundred of them — are built on one German army plan: the field shelter,
Pferdestall,
for horses. These drafty barns, knocked up on the bare marshy ground with wood and tarpaper, are designed to shelter fifty-two animals. But a man needs less
room than a horse. Three shelves per stall gives a hundred fifty-six spaces. Put three prisoners on a tier, deduct space for the trusty’s room, the block office, the food service area, the slop vat area; result, about four hundred men per
Pferdestall.

That’s the regulation number, more or less; but regulations in Auschwitz are elastic, and heavy overcrowding is the usual thing. Sammy Mutterperl rescued Jastrow from a block where over a thousand men, mostly newcomers sick in the bowels, turned and squirmed all night in every inch of space, in the tiers and on the mud floor, faces jammed to assholes in the dark; where every morning ten or twenty glassy-eyed open-mouthed corpses had to be dragged outside to the roll call, and piled up for the meat wagons. Skilled artisans and foremen like Mutterperl are in the less crowded blockhouses like this one. The mushrooming camp needs these surveyors, locksmiths, carpenters, tanners, cooks, bakers, doctors, draftsmen, linguist-clerks, and the like; so life in their huts may include fuel for the stoves, endurable food, and good water and latrine privileges. Some of those fellows may even survive the war, if the Germans will let anyone survive Auschwitz.

The block of the Klinger kommando is bad enough. The lukewarm morning ersatz coffee, watery evening soup, and single slice of sawdusty bread are the usual Auschwitz ration: in itself, a sentence to slow death. But the kitchen has special orders about hard workers and skilled men: distribution twice a week of extra slices of bread, salami, or cheese to the privileged list. This enriched dole is still less than the “regulation” ration, for the SS consumes, or steals and sells, half the food consigned by Berlin for prisoners. Everybody knows that. They steal all food parcels for Jews from the outside, too; other prisoners, especially British inmates, can end up with part of their parcels. Still, the Klinger gang does well on the added calories, though some of them do gradually dwindle to
Musselmen.
These are a familiar Auschwitz type, the Musselmen; men starved down to dreamy emaciated moving mummies, doomed to be clubbed or kicked to death for slow work, when they don’t simply drop and die at random.

Men like Mutterperl and Jastrow are not going to fade to Musselmen. A different fate awaits them. The sardonic word has long since leaked down from the Labor Section: when the work is done, the kommando will have the great honor of going up the chimney first. Auschwitz humor! Also probably the truth; a variation of the Sonderkommandos’ fate.

With a practiced movement Jastrow slides feet first into the middle bunk that he shares with Mutterperl, who lies asleep in the blankets which he “organized” from Canada; and which, despite the prevailing thievery, nobody steals from him. The tier shakes. Mutterperl opens his eyes.