The Fighter Read online

  After an infinite length of time (one hour? much more? much less?), the alert is over. The doors open. They shave our bodies and tear off our skin in the usual manner. On our first day in the camp, they sheared a strip of hair on our heads. Now they shave the rest. They immerse us into a vat of gasoline to kill the lice. The kapo advises us to close our eyes, but my eyes still burn when I come out. This is nothing compared to the maddening pain that gnaws the places where the shears tore my skin away, especially between the legs. Then we are entitled to a real shower. I mean, a real Auschwitz shower, with neither soap nor towel—a divine shower, the first for me since the clothing kommando. I say good-bye to the king-sized jacket I had received in that wonderful clothing kommando, which was turning slowly into rags. They give us shirts and uniforms that look like striped pajamas. I’m glad they allow me to keep my good winter boots.

  In this part of the world, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, the winter temperature falls below zero. I wonder whether the pajamas can keep us warm. Right now, I’m burning and shivering, my head is spinning, I find it hard to breathe. I guess I caught a cold during the alert.

  They let us sleep on the floor in the delousing block. I collapse and sink into a deep sleep. In the morning, I feel someone shaking me. I see a fuzzy face, as if through a thick fog.

  “Is that you, Brod? Where are we? What happened?”

  “Wake up, Wisniak. This is no time to be sick. Get up, quick. A doctor is going to inspect us again.”

  He helps me stand up. I’ve got to walk on my own two feet in front of the doctor. I’m lucky. This is not an SS doctor like yesterday, but a prisoner in a doctor’s smock, supervised by a plain SS. He can see that I’m tottering and shivering.

  “Do you want to go to the hospital or to the mine?”

  I try to answer, “To the mine,” but I hear that my voice has a mind of its own.

  “I’m sick. Leave me alone.”

  I’ve lost control. My fever has taken over. The doctor seems angry.

  “What kind of a joke is this? You’re healthy enough to work.”

  The SS offers his own diagnosis:

  “He’s sick. Send him to the KB.”j

  Suddenly, the doctor punches me in the chest. He doesn’t hit very hard, but my legs are so wobbly that I fall to the ground. Instantly, I rebound like a spring. This is a camp rule: when you’re hit, you get right up and stand at attention until the next one comes. If you stay down, you’ll be kicked or clubbed to death. I don’t stand up in obeyance of the law, but because I have acquired this reflex long ago, like all the prisoners who survived the fateful first three weeks.

  The doctor turns toward the SS.

  “See, he’s very strong. He’ll make a good miner.”

  My mind is all mixed up. I don’t understand what’s happening to me. I complain to Brod: “Did you see that swine? Hits a sick man! Calls himself a doctor….”

  “Don’t you understand? He just saved your life! He saw your number. He knew you would get up.”

  We line up in rows of five and walk to Jawischowitz,k where there is a camp near the mine. The doctor was right: if I were really sick, I wouldn’t be able to walk.

  The SS guards who oversee us want to have some fun.

  “You make too much dust when you drag your shoes, you shitbags. Take them off!”

  We bruise and scrape our feet on the stones of the un-paved road. In spite of the pain, I keep on walking. The SS order us to walk faster. I walk faster. They order us to sing. I sing and I walk. They dole out blows to teach us how to sing in tune. I shake with fever, I endure the blows, I sing and I walk. I begin to weep like a child. Brod worries.

  “Feeling worse, Wisniak? I’ve never seen you cry. Your feet hurt?”

  “Until the age of six, I went barefoot. The soles of my feet aren’t as calloused as they used to be, but I can take it. No, I’m crying out of joy, because we escaped the Sonderkommando.”

  Chapter 19

  There’s no patrol in front of the fence

  After half a day’s walk, we reach Jawischowitz. This camp is much smaller than Birkenau. There are other differences. They welcome us in a civilized manner by giving us “coffee.” What’s more, they serve it in regular bowls, not in chamber pots. As we’re even more thirsty than usual, because of the road’s dust, we rush toward the barrels. The Jawischowitz kapos slow us down with their clubs, but they don’t kill anybody. We can enjoy a warm shower with soap. We sleep on straw mats. One man per mat. Paradise!

  We don’t go down to the mine right away, because they quarantine us. They want to check that none of us have a contagious disease. It would be bad for production if we spread diseases to the real Polish miners. Here, they do not produce corpses like in Auschwitz, but coal for the Reich.

  During our quarantine, we dig trenches in the mud. It rains, it snows. We get a marvelous hot shower every evening, but afterward I have to put my wet clothes on again. They never seem to dry. It would be better if I was sandwiched between two comrades at night, like before. I am always cold. I don’t eat enough to regain my strength. My fever returns, bringing along a nasty cough and my familiar companion, diarrhea. When I fall asleep, I see the gas chamber in my nightmares—the entangled corpses, the strangled children, the earth oozing blood. My will to live frays gently but steadily. I would like to die without suffering. I talk to Brod.

  “Did you notice there is no patrol in front of the fence?”

  “So what? Do you want to escape?”

  “This is not like Auschwitz. You can throw yourself onto the wire without being bothered. You die at once.”

  “What are you talking about? We decided we would survive, don’t you remember? We’re going to tell the world what we’ve seen.”

  “They’ll fix up this camp, put patrols and kommandos everywhere. Soon, it won’t be possible anymore. We have to hurry.”

  “I wish you’d stop raving, Wisniak. Your fever is muddling your mind.”

  I get up in the middle of the night. I walk noiselessly across the sleeping block. Soon, I won’t suffer anymore. Suddenly, a blow to the nape of my neck knocks me down. Someone drags me back to my bed. When I wake up for morning call, I remember vaguely that I wanted to walk out of the block, but I’ve forgotten why.

  “Say, Brod, do you think you could knock a guy down with one blow?”

  “Me? Certainly not.”

  “You boxed, didn’t you?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Listen, I have a feeling that a comrade saved my life last night. If it was you, thanks.”

  Every morning, I am surprised—and relieved—not to see corpses lined up in bunches of five outside the block. In Jawischowitz, the sick are taken to a real infirmary. Nevertheless, out of the four hundred comrades in our kommando, one hundred become Muselmen after a few days, exhausted by hunger and the icy winter rain. They walk back to Auschwitz and the gas chamber.

  At the end of the quarantine period, they check our health again. I’ve eaten charcoal to cure my diarrhea. I feel okay. Two doctors, an SS and a Polish prisoner, feel our muscles and look at our teeth, as if we were horses. They judge me fit for service. I hope to go down soon into the warm entrails of mother earth. In the meantime, we’re still digging. The weather is getting colder every day. The earth is beginning to freeze. Shivering in our striped pajamas, we try to cut open the hardened ground with our picks and spades. The kapos hit us vigorously but not viciously. They just want to keep warm.

  Chapter 20

  An elevator that falls a thousand feet down

  On the morning of our first day in the mine, the camp senior, a Polish criminal, delivers a short speech:

  “You Jews, you’ve never worked in your life. I wonder how you’ll manage in the mine. I’ll pray to God and ask him to let you come up alive.”

  The mine is a half-hour walk from the camp. The SS guards who come with us stay above ground. Twenty of us huddle in an elevator that falls a thousand feet dow
n in less than a minute. The plunge is so violent that I’m afraid my digestive tract will expel food at both ends.

  Polish miners—that is, free people, who live outside the camp—welcome us at the bottom.

  “So, you Jews, you ain’t eatin’ fat geese and honey cakes no more!”

  Some of them kick us playfully when we walk in front of them, others just spit on the ground. We reach a kind of round chamber at the end of a long well-lit corridor. Dark tunnels branch off from the chamber in all directions. There is no more electric light, so we must turn on our headlamps.

  Brod, a comrade named Gelber, and I make up a team. We will be helping two Polish miners—an old man and his younger assistant. Two black giants. The old man sighs when he sees us.

  “Look at these Jews they give us! The three of them together weigh less than me…. Do you understand what I say, you midgets? Do you speak Polish?”

  “Yes, we’re Polish, all three of us.”

  “That’s a good thing. Before you, I had some Dutch Jews who didn’t understand a bloody word. Look, you have to shovel up these stones and throw them into the tipcart.”

  We’re digging a gangway that leads to a coal vein. Specialists called blasters blow up the front of the gangway with dynamite. We remove debris, break rocks with pneumatic drills or pickaxes, shovel earth and stones. Other teams extract the valuable ore from the vein.

  The young miner speaks some French, having worked in the mines in the north of France. He shovels up a hundred pounds of earth at a time and sneers when we can barely raise half that much. I do shovel up more than the old man. And besides, the young one stops often to rest. Then he watches the end of the tunnel for the foreman’s light. Indeed, a faint glow pierces the darkness eventually. The old miner warns us:

  “It’s him!”

  “Le porion,”l the young man says in French.

  We work faster. Just as I hoped, we’re nice and warm in the mine. Our pajamas are as soaked with sweat today as they were with rain yesterday.

  The foreman is here. He carries his lantern in one hand, an iron bar in the other one.

  “How do they work?” he asks the old miner.

  “Like Jews!”

  The foreman expected this answer, I guess. He starts hitting me with his bar. I try to dodge, but his light blinds me. I twist and turn so he’ll hit my shoulders and back rather than my head. After about ten minutes, he chooses Gelber as his second victim, but he is tired and doesn’t hurt him too much. He turns toward Brod.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll get it tomorrow. You’d better work, you stinking Jews. Especially you”—he points his finger at me—”because I can see you’re stronger than the others.”

  When he’s gone, I can’t help weeping—for the second time since I’ve come to Auschwitz. I am covered with cuts and bruises. There is no part of my body that doesn’t ache. With most of my flesh and muscles long gone, my bones are exposed. One of my shinbones hurts so much that I can barely stand up.

  The young miner whistles to express his admiration.

  “You, Jew, you’re a strong one. You didn’t even scream. The guys who were here before you bawled and fell down….”

  The old man keeps silent. It seems to me that he might be ashamed. I show my bruises to him.

  “You really hate Jews! I don’t think I worked so bad. Why did you want the foreman to beat me?”

  “I didn’t say you were a bad worker.”

  “Work like Jews? You might as well have told him we were lazy good-for-nothings.”

  “If you had started screaming like the guys who were here before you, he would have left you alone sooner. Look, now you’re all bloody.”

  He isn’t really mean. He lends me his tea bottle and his handkerchief so I can rinse my mouth. I also wipe my face, because the kapos hate the sight of blood.

  No kapo notices anything. When we come out of the mine, we’re covered with grime anyway. We feel human again after our warm evening shower! Even more amazing than the shower: they give us clean pajamas to sleep in. We use our mining pajamas as pillows.

  Instead of eating in the block as in Auschwitz, we sit in a dining room. They give us a soup—which sometimes includes a floating turnip—and a spoonful of jam and margarine. Every now and then, we get a piece of sausage. This is supposed to make us strong enough to lift ten tons of earth and stones each day.

  On our second morning underground, the foreman tells us our two miners don’t need three helpers. He sends Brod to another team.

  When we step out of the elevator, we see the Polish miners who kicked us and joked about fat geese yesterday. They stare at me as if I were some kind of ape. Nobody dares kick me. I don’t know what I look like, since we have no mirrors, but I can guess that my face has swelled up and turned black and blue during the night.

  The old miner didn’t expect me to work. “When the foreman used to beat a Jew with his iron bar, the Jew would spend a few days in the infirmary. You didn’t have to be back today already.”

  “I don’t trust the infirmary….”

  “At least you can rest a little. If you see a glow at the end of the tunnel, start working.”

  Our two Poles rest more than a little. Digging a gangway is tough and uncertain work. You never know in advance what kind of rock you’ll find. Then you spend lots of time waiting for the blaster, assembling venting tubes to draw up the gasses, setting up steel pillars to hold the ceiling, laying rails for hauling tipcarts called tubs. The gangway’s progression is always quite slow, so the foreman can’t expect us to move much faster. The miners who work in the coal vein have a very different job. They advance in a regular manner. If they tried to rest like us, the foreman would notice right away.

  After a while, the old miner offers me a piece of bread and some bacon.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Are you sure? Is it because of the bacon? You don’t eat pork?”

  “I don’t believe in religion. I am not hungry. Give it to Gelber.”

  Of course, hunger never ceases to wrench my guts, but I have noticed that I often suffer from diarrhea after taking a beating. I’d rather be careful.

  By and by, my pain subsides. A few days later, I accept the old miner’s bread. We do not see the foreman for a whole week. Then he returns and asks the old miner: “So, how do these Jews work?”

  “Just fine.”

  “See, these pigs have been idle all their life. The only way to cure their laziness is to give them a good thrashing!”

  Chapter 21

  I swallow six eggs with their shells

  Although I supplement our pitiful meal with half of the miner’s bread (Gelber eats the other half), I feel I’m weakening again. In Jawischowitz, they don’t club prisoners to death, but they let them become Muselmen day after day. The end is the same.

  The SS raise pigs in a corner of the camp. When they throw vegetable peels to them, the prisoners fight to catch a few.

  The young miner suggests an exchange. “I bring you some food, you give me clothes.”

  I guess he worked out this type of barter with our predecessors. Clothes are easy to find in the camp, since suitcases full of them arrive every day in Auschwitz. I don’t like the idea of a career in the black market, but I have no choice: if I don’t find some food, I’ll become a Muselman and go to the gas.

  In the camp’s slang, the verb organisieren, which is the same as our “organize,” means “to find a way of getting.” I organize a pair of socks by giving up a piece of sausage that comes with our soup. The prisoners usually go barefoot in their shoes, or wear rags called Russian socks. I put on the real socks to go down into the mine, then I come out barefoot. The young miner gives me half a loaf of bread and a dry sausage. I eat part of this treasure. I’ll use the rest as currency.

  On the following days, I bring down shirts and even blankets, which I wrap around my body. I get great quantities of food. I am very careful not to carry it up right away. Since they search us every three or four
days, I wait until the day after a search. One evening, as I’m carrying a precious cargo, six eggs, I notice that we’re slowing down as we approach the camp’s gate. This means that the SS and kapos, who are no fools, have decided to search us two days in a row. Knowing this might happen, I always walk near the end of the line. If I throw the eggs on the ground, they’ll punish us all. I don’t hesitate more than half a second: I have to swallow them with their shells. I worry a little, not knowing whether this is possible. The first one slides down quite well, so I guess I can do it. The last egg drops into my stomach as we pass the gate.

  The Polish miners are not supposed to feed us. When the kapos find pieces of bread in a comrade’s pockets, they “give him twenty-five.” This means twenty-five blows on the buttocks with their clubs. After such a beating, only a very strong man can avoid becoming a Muselman in a few days.

  Some prisoners bring back cigarettes and vodka for the kapos and block seniors. They are exempt from the search, of course.

  Chapter 22

  The cooks get used to me

  The six eggs leave a bitter aftertaste. Another time, I’ll bring a piece of bread or sausage too big to swallow and they’ll catch me. This smuggling is too dangerous. I’d better stop.

  All the prisoners have to find food if they want to survive. Many comrades work in the mine at night and get another job when they come back in the morning. Some become servants for a kapo or block senior. They make their master’s bed and wash his shirts for a few ounces of bread. Others help the shoemakers manufacture or repair boots for the SS. This task would suit me, since I know leather. I could even become a full-time shoemaker and stop going underground. Except I don’t want to work for the SS. Too dangerous. The only way to avoid being shot by an angry—or playful—SS is never to go near any of them.