The Fighter Read online

  “We’re building a fence that’s still unfinished, but if we step on the other side, we’re attempting to escape, is that it?”

  “Yes. Then I’ve seen him climb down from his tower to check whether he hit the center of his target.”

  The SS has had enough of this game. On my second day with the kommando, he tries a more ordinary one. He throws cigarettes on our side of the fence.

  “These are for whoever will box!”

  Instead of killing us himself, he hopes one of us will kill another. Why would we do such a stupid thing? For a few cigarettes? We rejoice that we’ve found a good kommando. We’re not going to risk our lives for a handful of smokes.

  Ha, but wait! Two guys I remember from Pithiviers (Czech Jews, I think) come forward, ready to fight to the death. Both of them box well, but one of them, who is taller, lands most of his punches. The smaller one howls with pain, stoops, and puts a knee to the ground. I watch from a distance while I work. In the meantime, the SS leaves us alone. After an hour or so, I see that the tall one has knocked out the small one. Is he dead—or only wounded and ready for block seven? He lies on the ground until the end of our workday. Two prisoners carry him away.

  We’ve walked half a mile on our way back to the camp. Now that the watchtower guard can’t see us anymore, the dead man stands up suddenly and laughs! We laugh, too, and applaud. Everybody thought the Czech Jews were fighting for real. These guys are real pros.

  Our kapo is angry. He addresses the smaller man: “You, if you come back here tomorrow, the guard will recognize you. He’ll know that we tricked him and he will kill us all.”

  “All right. I’ll go with another kommando.”

  If he goes, we need someone to replace him. I talk about it to Brod.

  “They don’t kill us. They don’t even hit us.”

  “I’m a tailor. My father was a tailor, and his father was a tailor. What do I know about electricity? As soon as I touch electric wires, sparks begin to fly everywhere. Oil lamps were good enough for me, I tell you.”

  “You’ll only have to carry the wires. Come on!”

  He joins our kommando the next morning.

  About ten days later, they line us up for an inspection. An SS examines us, then picks out seven men. I have a feeling he’s looking for people who’re still in fairly good shape. He selects me, as well as Brod. He doesn’t ask us whether we’re trained electricians.

  Chapter 16

  We perceive shreds of screams, carried by the wind’s uneven breath

  We make up a small kommando, with no kapo to second our SS. He leads us to a camp annex, beyond the gate. Something is fishy. The SS doesn’t shout, doesn’t scold us for walking too slowly, doesn’t call us shitbags. He explains, as if he were talking to friends, that we’ll be able to eat, drink, and even smoke. And that after one week, our situation will improve yet again. We’ll be able to wash and we’ll receive new clothes. Next we expect he’ll offer us women. Fishy and scary.

  We reach our new workplace around noon. We discover two large rectangles, some sixty yards long by thirty yards wide, delimited by a furrow in the ground. Three poles with floodlights stand in the center and at the ends of the first rectangle. We’re to dig them up and drive them back into the ground so as to light the other rectangle. One of us, a real electrician, ties special hooks on his hands and feet so he can climb to the top of the poles and remove the wiring.

  We notice that the ground seems damp in places. We move toward the poles. Our feet sink into the mud. We wade in a red liquid. Blood!

  The SS stays far away from us, more than forty yards. Maybe he doesn’t want to soil his shiny black boots. Or he is scared. Seeing death face-to-face every day has toughened us, but we are scared, too. This is not an ordinary fear, but a kind of deep terror that paralyzes and silences us.

  We move the poles and install the floodlights. This is easy work. It is over after two or three hours.

  “See that shed?” the SS asks. “That’s where you eat. Then you stay there. You don’t look outside. Do you understand?”

  We spend the rest of the day in the shed without doing or saying anything. I just exchange a few whispers with Brod.

  “There are bodies.”

  “Hundreds. Did you see the size of the rectangles?”

  “You could say thousands.”

  “The comrades who raised the poles… they’re down there.”

  “We’re next. They’ll throw us in.”

  On the morning of the second day, we arrive much earlier. We find out that a kommando came during the night and excavated the second rectangle. It now resembles a three-foot-deep swimming pool bordered by mounds of earth. They lock us up in the shed right away, so we can’t see whether there’s anything in the swimming pool.

  Yesterday, the SS said we shouldn’t look outside the shed, but he doesn’t say anything today. I guess it doesn’t really matter, since we’re going to die anyway.

  All the prisoners know that the Germans murder old people and mothers with their children. We heard about gas as soon as we entered the camp, but we didn’t know how the executioners actually proceeded. So here it is. From our shed window, we watch—as a feeling of dread tears our hearts—the grim spectacle of the Jews’ extermination. We can see several small houses in the distance. We hadn’t even noticed them on the first day, but the nearest one is quite visible. Two groups of naked Jews are walking toward this house. On one side, old men and boys. On the other side, women, girls, and babies. Twenty people altogether. I find it odd that they don’t look worried. Four men dressed in white and two SS flank them. The Jews enter the small house. The SS close the door. An SS brings in a container that looks like a can of paint. We hear the muffled noise of a trapdoor closing. Then we perceive shreds of screams, carried by the wind’s uneven breath. Brod, who has had a religious education, says he recognizes the prayer Shema Israel: “Hear, O Israel—the Eternal is our Lord, the Eternal is One.”

  The men in white live separately, in their own camp, but everybody has heard about them. They belong to the Sonderkommando (the special kommando). They live in comfort, they eat as much as they want, they are gassed after three months. The SS promised us new clothes at the end of the week. They’re white clothes.

  While the Jews are dying in the small house, teams of men in white are laying rails between the house and the pit. Then they bring small flatcars, simple platforms on wheels, to the house’s door. Breathing through a mask, they enter the house, load the bodies on the flatcars, and throw them into the pit. When it’s over, they cover them with earth. In the meantime, huge fans, which roar like airplane engines, clear the gas. Thus, the next group of Jews will approach the house without noticing any foul smell.

  The earth rectangle now looks just like yesterday’s. We come out of the shed and move the poles and the floodlights to the next rectangle. Then we eat and spend the rest of the afternoon in silent meditation.

  I remember a Greek Jew telling me about his kommando. They dug a huge pit every night. Nobody knew why. There were at least two hundred men. It took no time at all.

  I guess this kommando digs at the beginning of the night. They start gassing the Jews before dawn. When we arrived, the pit was probably quite full already. We saw the gassing of the last group. The mothers, the kids. I would prefer them to shout and cry. The Sonderkommando men always remove the rails and flatcars before a new group is brought to the house. Thus, they can’t guess what it is all about. They don’t tell them they’ll be poisoned with gas. I wonder what they do tell them. That the small house is a dining hall where they’ll eat. Naked? No, it doesn’t make sense. They had us undress when we arrived, so they could shave us. They disinfected us with a powder against lice. Yes, this is more likely: “You’ll take a hot shower and then we’ll disinfect you.” So the people undress. Why do they need them to be naked? They want the clothes, that’s why. When I worked in the Kleidenkammer, I thought that the clothes came from the suitcases left in the trai
n. Now I understand that there were also clothes from the dead.

  On the third day, we see that several old men refuse to cross the threshold. Maybe they’ve guessed why they’re being pushed, naked, into a small house with an armored door. The men in white take them to the side. When the others are in and the door is closed, the SS kill them with a bullet to the head. The SS never kill anyone in front of the women and children, lest it cause a panic.

  On the fourth or fifth day, our SS ceases to lock us inside the shed. We can walk around freely. He wants us to become familiar with our future job. One of us even enters the gas chamber to change a lightbulb. He talks to the men in white and confirms my hypothesis.

  “They promise them a hot shower and a meal. They say, ‘Hurry up and wash before the soup gets cold.’”

  We gather near the small house when the men in white, masks on, open the door and pull out the corpses. The naked bodies are so terribly entangled that they become one gigantic monster. We try not to think of the horrendous spasms that locked them in this manner. Wild, frightening grins distort the faces. The gelatinous globes of the eyes have jumped out of their sockets, the better to stare at us from the world of the dead. We hear sharp snaps and cracks: the men in white are breaking the bones to untangle the corpses before they carry them to the flatcars.

  Most mothers grasp the neck of their child with clenched hands. They strangled their own kid to bring on a faster death. We mutter, “Oy veh,” a Yiddish cry that means, “Oh pain…”

  We’ve seen thousands of corpses in Auschwitz. We’re old numbers, all of us. We thought we had seen everything. Yet, on this day, we discover that there is no limit to human cruelty and pain. We know that we just crossed an invisible border. If we survive, we’ll never be ordinary men again.

  Many ancient myths tell of a character who sees terrible things or offends the gods, then becomes blind or turns into a statue. Will we lose our sight? Pierce our own eyes like Oedipus? We walk back to our shed without talking to each other. The next day, we do not go out, although the door stays open. We speak in whispers.

  “Next week, we’ll be dressed in white.”

  “From then on, three months.”

  “How do they put away the Sonderkommando? Do you think they gas them?”

  “I’d prefer a gunshot.”

  “You can always run toward the fence if you want a bullet in the head.”

  “We can still escape. Or at least, we can try to find a way.”

  “Me, I’d rather stay. We’re doomed anyway. In the Sonderkommando, I can drink and eat. I’ll sleep in a bed, I’ll wash, I won’t get beaten anymore.”

  In our group of seven men, two say they prefer to stay. If we want to turn back into ordinary prisoners, we have to hurry. We still sleep in our usual block, but we know that any day now, they’ll send us to the Sonderkommando’s separate camp.i

  Chapter 17

  Something must turn up before tomorrow

  Now that I am in line for the Sonderkommando, Laybich treats me with the kind of respect that men condemned to death get in jail before their execution. He gives me back my straw mattress. I can even sleep all alone. I don’t sleep well, though. I dream that my mother, Rachel, and my little Élie enter the small house. They’re glad they’ll be able to wash. Me, too, I want to enter the house and tell them to come out, but the door is locked already.

  The last time, Laybich called me Wisniak. Now he wants to know my first name.

  “Maurice.”

  “Maurice? Are you kidding? You mean Moshe!”

  “Yes, Moshe.”

  “Listen, Moshe. When you’re over there… If, some day, you never know… If they take me there to gas me… Find a heavy club and break my head with one blow. You’re strong, I know you can do it.”

  He wants me to shorten his suffering. To act like the mothers who murder their own children. Do I love him like I love my own son? I hate him. He had already taken my number down to choke me in my sleep and line up my body with four others outside the block. I want the bastard to suffer. Or do I? I don’t know. Revenge? Laybich is but a cog in the terrible machinery of the camp. He never decided to become a murderer. If the Germans hadn’t started this war and created the abomination of Auschwitz, he would be a tailor or a salesman somewhere in Poland. These Nazis are the real murderers. Could I club someone to death, actually? A friend, to keep him from suffering? An enemy? A German? I’ve never killed anybody. I’m not as brave as the mothers. I can still hear the sound of the men in white breaking apart their stiffened fingers.…

  Laybich acts like I already belong to the Sonderkommando. I don’t and I won’t. I want to survive and tell the world about Auschwitz. At least I’ll try. This is what makes me different from Laybich. “We’ll all die,” he says, “but I’ll die last.” He kills the dying to postpone his own death. He kills out of despair, in a way. Me, I hope to get out. I refuse to become a murderer, since I intend to go back to Paris and live an honorable life.

  Besides, these desperate killers don’t always survive longer than we do. They fight to the death with knives in the barons’ toilets, under the cold glare of the Russian war prisoners. It is said that Marek, our former block senior, was killed by an SS he had been peddling gold teeth to. That an SS should kill his golden goose shows how crazy they are.

  I need to be especially alert and wary. Today is our seventh day in the kommando. Something must turn up before tomorrow or I’m dead. I get up. I stand in the snow during the morning call. I drink the coffee. Nothing turns up. I go back to the kommando with my six comrades. We spend the morning in silence inside the shed. We hear muffled shots coming from the houses. Soon, dressed in white, we’ll have to reassure the poor naked Jews so that they cross the deadly threshold without faltering.

  We move the floodlights, then go back to the shed to eat. Just after lunch, our SS brings us back to the camp—as if he offered us an afternoon off to mark the end of our probation week.

  I’ve been resting in my block for twenty minutes or so when the camp’s loudspeakers bark an announcement: “Volunteers are required for a coal mine kommando. Anybody can apply, except for the seven electricians.”

  Without thinking at all, I run out of the block. Something has turned up!

  As I’m approaching the kommandos’ meeting point, I begin to think. What if our SS is there to check whether any of his electricians is trying to escape? Too bad. Even if my chances of success are low, it’s better to try my luck than to do nothing and end up in white, which means certain death.

  An SS doctor examines us, following the usual Auschwitz procedure: we undress and show him our backsides, since Muselmen can be recognized instantly by their fleshless buttocks. He also asks us to jump over a two-foot-wide trench. What with my boxer’s legs and a week of rest in the shed, I find it easy enough. Many comrades fail this test. In the end, the doctor keeps four hundred fit men.

  I see a smiling face. Good old Brod! He seized his chance, too.

  “Fancy meeting you here, Brod. You didn’t fall in the ditch, with that fat belly of yours?”

  “My legs were shaking. I wondered whether our SS was going to look for his electricians.”

  “We shouldn’t get our hopes up. You never know what to expect here. Maybe they are recruiting men for the Sonderkommando. Nobody ever volunteers, so they invent coal mines as a ploy.”

  “So tomorrow, either we’re dressed in white or we’re coal black at the bottom of the mine! Or our SS catches us. In that case, he puts a bullet into our skulls. Then we’re neither black nor white.”

  “He won’t come. I know him. He didn’t understand why the Sonderkommando scared us. He let us look at the gas chamber to help us conquer our fear. ‘See, my friends, nothing frightening about it. The Jews walk calmly into the little house. They pray to their God and die; then you bury them. It is quite simple.’ He’s sure he cured us of our silly fear.”

  “He thinks we’re eager to join the Sonderkommando?”

&
nbsp; “Of course! Three months of comfortable living! He would prefer that to a day-by-day struggle for life with constant beatings. He can’t imagine we’d choose the mine instead.”

  “Tomorrow, he’ll be missing two electricians out of seven.”

  “He won’t bat an eye. He’ll think our block senior killed us for any old reason—or without any reason.”

  We walk out of the camp with the usual escort of kapos and SS. We’re relieved to see that we go toward Auschwitz I rather than toward the gas chambers. We’ve made it!

  I’ve spent five months or so in Birkenau, but I feel I’ve always lived there. My former world has been reduced to a vague memory that sometimes haunts my nights.

  Chapter 18

  I am not strong enough to vanquish the Polish blizzard

  The distance between Auschwitz I and II is under two miles, but we need more than an hour to shuffle across. The icy December night is already falling when we reach Auschwitz I. We have to undress again to be shaved and deloused. Suddenly, after only three-quarters of our kommando have entered the delousing room, sirens begin to shriek: Air alert! Locking all blocks!

  You can’t always be lucky. I stay outside, naked in the cold air, with about a hundred comrades. We run every which way, looking for a block that might have kept its door open. Russian airplanes fly over the camp. Our chalky bodies glimmer like immense glowworms in the bright light of the Russian flares.

  Driven by our survival instinct, we flock together to escape the cold. Every one of us tries to dive as deep as he can into the warm pulsating swarm. Being stronger than the others, I reach the center quickly. Just as quickly, without being able to react or realize what’s happening, I am thrown back outside. Giant worms are entering the swarm in a constant flow, pushing and shoving, popping out, running around. I try shadowboxing to get warm, but I am not strong enough to vanquish the Polish blizzard. My blood is cooling. Soon I’ll be stiff and blue, like the corpses I used to see on the bridge when I crossed the Vistula. I throw myself onto my comrades and rub my skin against theirs. I enter the swarm again, but I can’t stop shivering.