The Fighter Read online

  A guy I knew before the war says something I don’t understand: “You’re lucky. They could have gassed you.”

  Chapter 11

  It seems to me he is heavier than a living man

  I spend my first night in the camp. Two tiers of six-foot-wide planks run along the wall. We sleep with our feet toward the wall and our heads near the central passage, lying on our side, stacked like forks in a cutlery drawer. I am glad to lie down for the first time since we left Pithiviers. I’d be able to sleep much better if I took off my heavy boots, but that’s impossible. “If you take off your boots, you’re dead.” Now and then, all the stacked bodies turn over together to change sides, without waking up.

  Just after I close my eyes, I hear beatings, screams, and the deputy shouting.

  “Aufstehen! Aufstehen! (Get up!) Up with you, Hirenzine! Out! Faster, faster!”

  The morning has come already.… I jump down from my bunk and run outside. I receive only one small blow on the way. A French Jew, who slept on the same plank as me, receives a shower of blows while he’s putting on his shoes. His face is covered with blood. He has delicate hands and the look of an intellectual worker. I think about my older brother.…

  Whereas five bodies were lined up in front of the block last night, we now discover thirty, set in groups of five, naked, with tattooed arms sticking out so the number is easy to read. Laybich the deputy delivers a short eulogy for them.

  “I gave them coffee, but they weren’t satisfied. Let this be a lesson to you, my friends!”

  “What did he say?” the French Jew asks me in a whisper. “I don’t understand Yiddish, you know. Can you translate?”

  “Shut up, or we’ll end up the same way!”

  It is four A.M. or so. We stand up in rows of five until eight. Marek and Laybich call our numbers, count us again and again. Marek the block senior orders:

  “Mützen ab! Mützen auf!” (Caps off! Caps on!)

  This Marek probably dreamed of leading an orchestra when he was a kid. He wants our thousand caps to slap our thousand thighs together. Mützen ab! Mützen auf! Ten times. A hundred times. One hour. Two hours. We improve our act pretty fast when Marek kills five of us whose rhythm was slightly off.

  At eight, an SS inspects us and counts the dead. After he’s gone, we drink our morning “coffee,” then go look for a kommando. There is a kind of work pickup in the middle of the camp. The old-timers warn us.

  “During the first few days, you won’t be able to find a kommando outside the camp. The kapos prefer to pick up men they already know. Don’t worry and just wait. So many die that you’ll get a job soon.”

  In the meantime, we work inside the camp. I find work in the undertakers’ kommando. We carry away the bodies lined up in front of the blocks. I’m a strong and healthy newcomer. I don’t look like the living skeletons who frightened me so much yesterday. The kapo decides I can carry a corpse all by myself. I hold his legs over my shoulder, like suspenders. He hangs down my back. His head bumps on my calves at every step. His hands drag on the ground. It seems to me he is heavier than a living man.

  We carry the bodies to the Totenkammer (the chamber of the dead), where a kommando of dentists under the supervision of an SS pulls out gold teeth. If someone doesn’t unload his corpse head first, mouth opened, the SS has him killed right away. This produces a new corpse, whom nobody had to carry—he walked to the Totenkammer on his own two feet. The SS is always angry because bodies come in with their gold teeth missing. Some prisoners sell theirs for a piece of bread. What’s more, the block senior and the kapos will look inside your mouth, hoping to see something shiny down there. Some pull out your gold teeth without killing you, others kill you first. I’m lucky! I was always too poor to buy gold teeth.

  I’ll go crazy if I have to keep carrying corpses. I’m ready to try the worst outside kommandos—the ones the old-timers tell us to avoid because their kapos are ferocious killers. On the third day, I try a digging kommando. We’re removing small hillocks in order to flatten a field where they intend to build a factory or something. The old-timers were right—the kapo and his assistants the Vorarbeiter (foremen) are murderers. They kill fifteen prisoners out of two hundred. They order us to bring back the bodies, so I end up with two legs on my shoulders and a head bumping against my calves, like yesterday.

  I change to another kommando. I work in a swamp, which we have to fill up with stones and garbage. Something very unusual happens here. Just as a kapo is going to beat a tall newcomer with his club, the guy grabs the club and hits the kapo. This is a terrible scandal, because the kapo is a German criminal. Nobody is supposed to pull one hair off a German’s head! All the kapos and foremen come at once to their colleague’s rescue, but the tall prisoner is fighting like a devil. He is a young, strong athlete, used to fighting and winning.

  The SS who stand guard over us think the whole mess is quite funny. The kapos call them for help: “Shoot him!”

  “Go get him yourselves, you cowards! Shitbags!”

  The tall man defies the kapos:

  “You won’t kill me with your clubs. You’ll have to shoot me!”

  At least twelve kapos and foremen attack him together. He fights back bravely, but can’t resist for very long. In the end, they drown him in the swamp. When it’s over, the bastards take their revenge on us. None of the six hundred prisoners in the kommando is spared, and our tormentors kill fifty prisoners. All the other ones are injured or bruised to various degrees.

  I ask the old-timers for advice.

  “Is there a safer job?”

  “It’s the same thing everywhere,” they say.

  I try digging again. More men are killed or wounded than are spared. We can’t carry them back to the camp, so the kapos have to send for trucks.

  At the end of the first week, out of one thousand prisoners on my train, five hundred are still alive. We’re all very weak. In the morning, we drink the blackish liquid called coffee. When we come back from work, we drink another liquid, called soup. Pieces of turnip hide at the bottom of the huge pot. The block senior keeps them for himself and his good friends. Brod and I, we’re lucky: we have some spare fat on our body. Many prisoners lose weight very fast. In the camp’s slang, the walking corpses, the fleshless skeletons covered by a thin layer of skin, are called Muselman.f As they can’t climb up onto the bunks, they sleep on the ground, under the lower bunk, in mire and filth. They suffer from diarrhea, but don’t have enough strength to go empty their bowels outside.

  The French Jew with the delicate hands who slept on my bunk died a long time ago. He told me he worked in a couture workshop in Paris. He used to take off his fine Italian shoes to sleep, so they vanished on the second night. A kapo probably killed him outside, then his kommando brought him directly to the Totenkammer.

  All the kapos and foremen drool when they see my heavy winter boots. They force me to take them off so they can swap with me. My feet are like Cinderella’s. The boots are always too small for them! To be on the safe side, I decorate them with iron wire, so it looks like the sole is going to separate from the upper part and they leave me alone.

  I stay alive. I spend hours on my feet when Marek counts us and recounts us. Every evening, Laybich the deputy forces us to squat like frogs, legs apart. He writes down the number of those who can’t maintain a straight back. I stay motionless for three hours, four hours.

  Laybich and his death angels roam through the block in the middle of the night. They pull from their bunks the men who must cease to live and strangle them noiselessly. In the morning, we discover twenty bodies, or twenty-five, lined up in front of the block. The SS who inspects the blocks at eight a.m. finds it more convenient to count the bodies in fives. A ghost of a smile appears on his face when he sees a lot of corpses. Auschwitz is a factory for producing corpses.

  I’m sure the SS on the watchtowers also like to count the corpses, to alleviate their boredom. What do the bodies resemble from up there? Matches? No, they’re
not far enough away. Bundles of firewood, maybe. When they count the bodies, the SS call them Stücke, which means pieces. The watchtower guards count the pieces in front of the blocks. Five pieces, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five pieces…

  Sometimes, a comrade dies of exhaustion at three A.M., after Laybich and his angels have completed their round. Then, when Marek counts us, he comes up one short. He sends people to look inside the block. They find our comrade’s lifeless body in a dark corner.

  Marek gets mad at us.

  “I had twenty-five and now look what you’ve done, you Hirenzine!”

  The SS wants a multiple of five, so Marek kills four more of us to have his thirty pieces.

  Chapter 12

  I am not allowed to hit a German

  I work in yet another digging kommando with my friend Brod. Three young SS drive by in a car. They pass by slowly, twice, as if they were looking for something, then stop in front of me.

  “You, Jew! You seem strong.”

  “You know how to fight, I bet.”

  “We’ll find an opponent for you.”

  They want to have some fun. They’re twenty years old. They’re like children—we’re their toys. They pick a prisoner who is much taller than me, but has already become a Muselman. They think the contrast between a tough midget and a gaunt giant is entertaining.

  Many kapos and foremen have spent time in jail before coming to the camp. They were thieves, hoodlums. The stronger among them feel a kind of sadistic pleasure in killing a poor Muselman with a single blow. These two SS want to know whether I can do it. It is a kind of entrance exam. The other prisoners go on working. They watch out of the corner of their eyes.

  I throw big, hard punches, but I hold them back at the last fraction of a second so that I don’t hit him too hard. The Muselman’s bulging eyes look at me without seeing anything. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t try to fight. He’s like a shadow, actually. If this goes on, I’m afraid I’ll start crying. The two SS are not satisfied.

  “What kind of joke is this?”

  “Schweinkopf! (Pig’s head!) You’re making fun of us!”

  “If you don’t know what a real punch is like, I’ll show you. Come here. Look at me. Follow my eyes!”

  The SS looks to the right. I follow his eyes. Immediately, I get punched on the right side. Now he looks left. I expect a hook on the left, but he hits on the right again and laughs. This guy is more than just a fighter: he’s a real boxer. The SS tend to prefer boxing to golf or tennis. I played these kinds of games, at the club, to train my reflexes. If I could hit back, the game would become more interesting. Yeah, but I can’t hit a German. Assaulting a member of the superior race is a crime punishable by death. He hits me right and left, to the head, to the stomach, for a good thirty minutes. My abdominal muscles haven’t melted away yet, so I tighten them as much as I can. My face is bloody, but at least I avoid dying of a burst liver. He notices that I’m trying to dodge his blows. He sneers, and then hits harder, as if I were a punching bag.

  I’m beginning to feel groggy. I guess I’ll drift into death without being aware of it. This is not an unpleasant idea. I hear vaguely that the two other SS are interfering.

  “Leave him alone.”

  “He’s a good boxer. Maybe we can convince him to fight.”

  They ask four prisoners to carry me to the barrack they use as a kitchen. They lock me inside a wooden box full of knives and forks. I am conscious but unable to react, like in a dream. The box is three feet long, one and a half feet wide, one and a half feet high. It is similar to a child’s coffin.

  “Close the lid,” the SS say.

  “Roll the box on the ground.”

  “Faster. Come on! Faster, you shitbags!”

  The prisoners roll the box for maybe hundreds of feet. Strangely, I find this punishment rather restful. I am crammed so tight in the box that the knives and forks have no room to fly around and hurt me. What (and whom) is this cutlery for? While we eat with our fingers from chamber pots, there are boxes full of knives and forks in the kitchen! Our masters probably eat on embroidered tablecloths, on fine china. It is said that Dutch Jews bring enormous amounts of food in their luggage: preserves, rice, dried fruit. I wonder what kind of fruit grows in Holland. When I came to Paris, I ate oranges and bananas for the first time in my life, and even African figs and dates.… The French guards hooked two cars full of food to the back of our train when we left Pithiviers—for us to eat on our trip. I remember that one of these intellectual Jews who had come to France to study medicine tried to protest while we were waiting in a station: “Give us food! Open the supply cars!”

  “Shut up. What they’ll give you is a burst of bullets.”

  He wanted to write a letter of complaint: “We’ll all sign it. We’ll give it to the commander of the camp.”

  Another medical student sighed. “The Nazis began persecuting the Jews in 1933, nearly ten years ago. You know how the Jews defended themselves? They wrote hundreds of petitions, in Europe and even in America. Look what it did for us!”

  All these students are already dead. Arbeit macht frei. They’re free, now.

  One of the guys rolling the box whispers to me that I should try to scream, to please the SS. I wonder whether I’ll follow his advice. I’d rather go on floating in my dreamlike state. Besides, I don’t have enough strength left to scream. I can’t emit any sound…. And then, something inside me decides that I want to live, after all. I utter a kind of hoarse whine that soon turns into a scream. How long do I roll with the knives and forks? I don’t know. The men stop moving the box. They open the lid.

  I hear Polish kapos.

  “Incredible. He’s still alive.”

  “He’ll die now. A pity, too—he was a brave one.”

  “Water!”

  Who shouted “Water”? I think it is the man who was inside the box. Through a reddish mist, I see an amazing event: a kapo brings me a cup of water! Someone sticks toilet paper on my face as a dressing for my wounds. My comrades hold me during the walk back to the camp. I hear the kapos talking to the guards.

  “We have twenty dead and one hurt.”

  Usually, they take the wounded to block seven, a kind of hospital without doctors where the only cure is death. They spare me because I’m a hero: the Jew who refuses to kill a Muselman and resists the SS.

  Brod says I was wrong to risk my life.

  “That was a close call. You could have died. If you had hit the Muselman a little harder, you would have put a stop to his pain. He’s one or two days away from the end. It wouldn’t make such a big difference.”

  “No difference for him, maybe, but for me, yes. I have a little boy, you know. What will I tell him when I come back? I don’t want his father to be a murderer.”

  In the following days, even the most ferocious kapos treat me with respect. They give me easy tasks. I work like an automaton. The SS punched my head so many times that I can’t seem to regain my full mind.

  “He’s finished,” my comrades say when they look at me. “He’s good for block seven.”

  I kind of envy a Muselman who runs toward the electric fence to end it all. The comrades say I’m brave, but this man is braver than me. The watchtower guard kills him with two rifle shots. A Muselman will never reach the barbed wire. How could he run fast enough? And just in case the guard were to miss him, foremen armed with clubs patrol the fence. Their job is to catch the suicide runners and kill them slowly. It is simpler than repairing the fence after an electric short circuit.

  All the prisoners run to cover when the watchtower guard starts shooting. They’re afraid the guard might try to hit a few more targets just for fun. Me, I stay there like a fool, oblivious to the din around me. A kapo orders me to bring the corpse to the Totenkammer. Once more, I carry a bloody body on my back.

  Chapter 13

  Who is this stranger who saves my life?

  I live in a permanent daze. I don’t even recognize my comrades anymore. Brod hol
ds my hand as if I were a child and takes me to a good kommando, meaning a kommando where the kapo doesn’t kill his workers. We pull a large cart full of boxes and barrels from one camp to the other. There are two camps: Auschwitz I and II. The second one is also called Birkenau. That’s where I live, or rather, survive. We pull the cart two miles in one direction, then two miles in the other direction, all day long. I run to the front to help my comrades pull the cart and to the back to help push it. I help them raise the cart when it’s stuck in mud. I load and unload barrels weighing one hundred pounds.

  Actually, I don’t know I’m doing all this. Brod tells me about it later.

  “You worked twice as hard as anybody else!”

  Most prisoners suffer from diarrhea. We find it very difficult to stay clean. Standing for hours while the block senior counts us is terribly painful. I may still be strong enough to carry barrels, but my willpower has become so weak that I let the contents of my bowels run down my legs. If only we could wash…. Laybich the deputy hates people who stink. After the morning call, he comes to me, pinching his nose with two fingers:

  “You’ve lived long enough. I’ll take care of you.”

  He writes my number in his notebook. So that’s it. Over and done with. I passed the fateful three-week mark, but I’ll die anyway. I’m getting ready to live my last day on earth, to see the sun for the last time. Tonight Laybich will kill me and line up my corpse with four others outside the block. I never knew my father and now my little Élie will not know his, either. I don’t resist. I don’t care. I’ll join my kommando and work, like any other day. My kommando? Which one? Where am I? Utterly bewildered, I stop and look. I am inside the camp, a few steps away from the gate, alone. I could run toward the barbed wire.… If I’m lucky, the watchtower guard will kill me with a single shot to the head. Or the fence foremen will catch me and torture me….