Fatelessness

  But then, could anyone be acquainted with all the variants of stubbornness? For I can assure you, had I but known, there were many variants I could have chosen from in Zeitz. I heard about the past, the future, and a lot, a very great deal, about freedom above all; indeed, I can safely say, nowhere does one hear as much about it, it seems, as among prisoners, which naturally makes a lot of sense after all, I suppose. Yet others took some strange pleasure in an adage, a joke, a wisecrack of sorts. I heard this one myself, naturally. There is an hour of the day which falls between returning from the factory and the evening Appell, a distinctive, always bustling, and liberated hour that I, for my part, always looked forward to and enjoyed the most while in the Lager; as it happened, this was generally also supper time. I was just pushing my way through the milling, trading, and chatting knots of people when someone bumped into me, and a pair of tiny, worried eyes above a singular nose gazed at me from under the loose-fitting convict’s cap. “I don’t believe it,” we both said almost simultaneously, as he had recognized me and I him, the man with the bad luck. He immediately appeared to be delighted and inquired where my quarters were. Block 5, I told him. “Pity,” he said regretfully, since he was lodged elsewhere. He complained that he didn’t “get to see familiar faces,” and when I told him that I didn’t either he somehow looked crestfallen, though I don’t know why. “We’re becoming split up, all split up,” he observed with an implication in his words and the shaking of his head that was somewhat lost on me. Then his face brightened all of a sudden, and he asked, “Do you know what this here,” pointing to his chest, “this letter ‘U,’ signifies?” Sure I did, I told him: “Ungar, Hungarian.” “No,” he answered, “Unschuldig,” meaning “innocent,” then gave a snort of laughter followed by prolonged nodding of the head with a brooding expression, as if the notion were somehow highly gratifying, though I have no idea why. Subsequently, and quite often in the beginning, I saw the same on others in the camp from whom I also heard that wisecrack, as if they derived some warming, fortifying emotion from it—that at least is what was suggested by the unfailingly identical laugh and then that same softening of features, the dolefully smiling and yet somehow euphoric expression with which they told and hailed this witticism each and every time they told it, in much the same sort of way as when a person hears music that deeply touches his feelings or some particularly moving story.

  Yet all the same, with them too what I noticed was the same endeavor, the same good intention: they too wanted merely to be seen as good prisoners. Make no mistake about it, that was in our interest, that is what the conditions called for, that is what life there, if I may put it this way, compelled us to do. If the rows were perfectly in line and the numbers tallied, for instance, the roll call did not last so long—at least to start with. If one was diligent at work, for example, then one might avoid a beating—usually, at any rate.

  Even so, at least to start with, I believe the thinking of each and every one of us cannot have been guided entirely by that gain alone, not exclusively by that kind of benefit alone, I can honestly say. Take work, for example, the first afternoon of work, to start with that straightaway: the task was to unload a wagon of gray gravel. If, after Bandi Citrom and I—naturally having sought permission beforehand from the guard: on this occasion, a soldier who was getting on in years and, at first glance, more docile-looking—had stripped down to the waist (that was the first time I saw his golden-brown skin with the big, smooth muscles lithe under it and the darker patch of a birthmark below the left breast), he said, “Now then, let’s show these guys what Budapesters can do!” then he meant that perfectly seriously. And I tell you, considering it was after all the first time in my life that I had handled a pitchfork, that both the guard and the foreman-type guy, no doubt from the factory, who would nose around every now and then seemed rather satisfied, which only made us reintensify our efforts, naturally. If, on the other hand, a stinging sensation declared itself on my palms after a time, and I saw blood all around the base of my fingers, and then our guard in the meanwhile called over: “ Was is denn los?”13so I laughed and held up my palm to show him, whereupon he, abruptly turning surly, even giving a jerk on his rifle strap, demanded: “Arbeiten! Aber los!”14—then it was only natural, in the end, that my own interests should also turn to other things. From then on, I paid attention to just one thing: the times when he did not have his eyes on me, so I could steal the occasional quick breather, or how I might put as little as possible on my spade, shovel, or pitchfork; and I can tell you, later on I made very considerable progress in such tactics, at any rate gaining a great deal more expertise, schooling, and practice with them than in the performance of any job of work that I completed. And anyway, who profits from it, after all?—as I recall the “Expert” once asking. I maintain there was some problem here, some obstacle, some mistake, some breakdown. A word, a sign, a glimmering of appreciation now and again, nothing more, just a scintilla, might have proved more efficacious, for me at any rate. For what malice do we in fact have to bear against one another at the individual level, if one thinks about it? And then, after all, one retains a sense of pride even in captivity, so who would not, in the final analysis, lay claim, in his heart of hearts, to a drop of kindness, to say nothing of getting further with a considerate word, so I found.

  Still, at bottom, experiences of that kind could not truly shake me as yet. Even the train was still running; if I looked ahead, I dimly sensed the destination somewhere in the distance, and in the initial period—the golden days, as Bandi Citrom and I later dubbed them—Zeitz, along with the conduct it required and a dash of luck, proved a very tolerable place—for the time being, that is, in the interim, until a time to come should secure release from it, naturally. Half a loaf of bread twice a week, a third of a loaf—three times, a quarter— twice only, fairly regular Zulage, boiled potatoes once a week (six spuds, doled out in one’s cap, though more than likely there would be no Zulage to go with them), noodle milk pudding once a week. One is soon made to forget any initial annoyance at the early reveille by dewy summer dawns, the unclouded sky, and then a steaming mug of coffee too (and you need to be smart at the latrines, as the cry of “ Appell! Antreten!” will soon resound). The morning muster, in all likelihood, is bound to be short: after all, work beckons, presses. One of the factory side-gates that we prisoners are also allowed to use lies off to the left of the highway, down a sandy footpath about ten to fifteen minutes’ walk from our camp. Already from a long way off, there is a rumbling, clattering, throbbing, panting, a hacking cough of three or four iron throats: the greetings of the factory, though more a veritable town, what with its main and side roads, slowly trundling cranes, earth-grabbing machines, profusion of rail tracks, its labyrinth of flues, cooling towers, piping, and workshop buildings. The many pits, ditches, ruins, and cave-ins, the mass of ripped-up conduits and spilled-out cables, attest to visitations by aircraft. Its name, as I learned as soon as the first lunch break, is “Brabag,” which is “the shorthand formerly used even on the stock market” to refer to the “Braun-Kohl-Benzin Aktiengesellschaft”15so I heard; moreover a burly man who was just then resting his weight on one elbow with a weary sigh as he fished a nibbled hunk of bread from his pocket was pointed out as the one who was the source of that information and, it was subsequently rumored in the camp, always accompanied by a touch of glee, and who had also formerly owned a few shares in the company, I gathered (though I never heard him personally say as much)—and the smell alone may well have reminded me of the oil works in Csepel—that here too they are hard at work producing gasoline, though by dint of some ingenious trick that allows them to extract it from lignite rather than oil. I thought this was an interesting concept, even though I was well aware that wasn’t what they were looking for from me, naturally. The options offered by the work squads, the Arbeitskommandos, are always a matter of lively debate. Some swear by spades, others by pitchforks for choice; some proclaim the advantages of cable-laying work, yet othe
rs prefer being assigned to the cement mixers, while who could divine what hidden motive, what dubious predilection, makes certain individuals particularly attached to work on the drains of all things, up to their waists in yellow slime or black oil, though no one doubts the existence of such a motive since most of them happen to be from among the Latvians, plus of course their like-minded friends, the Finns. Only once a day does the word “Antreten,”16wafting down from on high, have a long, drawn-out, and inviting bittersweet lilt, and that is in the evening, when it signals the time to return home. Bandi Citrom squeezes through the throng around the washbasins with a shout of “Move over, Muslims!” and no part of my body can be kept hidden from his scrutiny. “Wash your pecker too! That’s where the lice lodge,” he’ll say, and I comply with a laugh. This marks the start of that particular hour, that hour of odd matters to attend to, of jokes or complaints, visits, discussions, business deals, and exchanges of information that only the homely clatter of cauldrons, the signal that galvanizes everyone, stirs everyone into quick action, is capable of breaking. Then “Appell!” and it’s a matter of sheer luck how long for. But then, after a lapse of one, two, or, tops, three hours (with the arc lights going on in the meantime), the great rush along the narrow gangway of the tent, hemmed in on both sides by rows of three-tier bunk-bedding spaces, here called “boxes.” After that, for a while yet, the tent is all semidarkness and whispering; this is the time for spinning yarns, tales about the past, the future, freedom. I got to learn that back home everyone had been a very model of happiness, usually wealthy as well. It was also at this time that I could get an idea what people used to have for their supper, and even, from time to time, certain other topics of what, between men, sounded like a confidential nature. It was then that speculations were debated (though I never heard anything more about it later on) that a form of sedative, a “bromide,” was being mixed into the soup for some particular reason— that’s what was alleged at any rate, amid exchanges of knowing and always slightly enigmatic looks. Bandi Citrom too could always be relied on at this time to bring up Forget-me-not Road, the lights or—particularly in the early days, though there were not that many observations of my own that I could make on the subject, naturally—the “Budapest girls.” At other times, I would become aware of a suspicious muttering, a quiet, stifled chanting and shaded candlelight coming from one of the corners of the tent, and I heard that it was Friday night, and across there was a priest, a rabbi. I scrambled over the tops of the plank-beds to take a look for myself, and in the middle of a group of men it actually was him, the rabbi I already knew. He was going through the devotions just as he was, in prison garb and hat, but I did not watch him for long since I yearned more for sleep than prayers. I am berthed with Bandi Citrom on the uppermost tier. We share our box with two more bedfellows, both young, likable, and also from Budapest. Wooden planks with straw on them and sacking over the straw serve for bedding. We have one blanket between two, though in the end even that is too much in summertime. We don’t exactly have a terrific abundance of space: if I turn over, my neighbor has to do the same, and if my neighbor draws his legs up, I have to do the same; still, even so, sleep was deep and expunged all memories. Those were golden days, indeed.

  I began to notice the changes a bit later on—in the matter of rations, first and foremost. I and the others could only speculate how the era of half-loaves could have flown by so swiftly; into its place, at all events, irreversibly stepped the era of thirds and quarters, even the Zulage was no longer always an absolute certainty. That is also when the train began to slow down and eventually came to a standstill altogether. I tried to look ahead, but the prospect stretched only to tomorrow, while tomorrow was an identical day, that is to say, another day exactly the same as today—in the best case, of course. My zest dwindled, my drive dwindled, every day it was that little bit harder to get up, every day I turned in for sleep that little bit wearier. I was that little bit hungrier, found it took that little bit more effort to walk, somehow everything started to become harder, with me becoming a burden even to myself. I (all of us, I dare say) was no longer absolutely always a good prisoner, and we were soon able to recognize the reflections of this, of course, in the soldiers, not to speak of our own functionaries, and among these, if only by virtue of his rank, the Lagerältester.

  He is still only ever to be seen, anytime and anywhere, in black. It is he who shrills the morning whistle for reveille, he who inspects everything last thing in the evening, and all sorts of things are said about his living quarters somewhere up at the front. German by language, Gypsy by race—even among ourselves he is only known as “the Gypsy”—which is also the primary reason why a concentration camp was designated as his abode, the other being the deviant streak in his nature that Bandi Citrom had immediately sized up at first glance. The green triangle, on the other hand, was a warning to all that he had robbed and killed a lady who allegedly was older and also, so the rumor goes, very rich, and had in fact been his means of support, so it was said; this was therefore the first time in my life I had the chance to see a genuine murderer in person. His duty was the law; his job, to enforce order and justice in our camp—not exactly a particularly comforting thought at first hearing, everyone reckoned, myself included. On the other hand, I was made to see that at a certain point nuances can be deceptive. I personally, for instance, had more trouble with one of the Stubendiensts, even though he is an irreproachably honest man. That is indeed why he was elected by the same close acquaintances who chose Dr. Kovács the Blockältester (that title, I gathered, denotes his status as a lawyer, not a physician), all of them being from the same place, so I hear, the picturesque area around Siófok on the southern shore of Lake Balaton. I mean the ginger-headed guy known universally as Fodor. Now, whether it is true or not, there is general agreement: the Lagerältester uses his club or fist for fun, because, according to camp gossip at any rate, he supposedly derives a certain pleasure from that, something related to what he is also after, the better-informed profess to know, with men, boys, and sometimes even women. With Fodor, though, order is not a pretext but a veritable precondition, and should necessity compel him to act in a similar manner, that is in the general interest—as he never omits to mention. Still, order is never total, indeed ever less so. That may be why he feels obliged to lash out with the long handle of the ladle among those pushing in the queue, and this is how— should one fail by some accident to know the way to approach the soup vat, placing one’s bowl precisely at a defined spot on its rim—one may join the ranks of the illstarred out of whose hands mess tin and soup might easily go flying on such an occasion, because—no question, and the approving murmur behind one indeed signals as much—one is thereby holding him up in his work and therefore also us, those next in line, and also why he pulls Seven Sleepers down from the bunks by the legs, for after all, the sins of one will be visited upon the innocent others. A distinction in intention has to be drawn, naturally, but what I am saying is that such nuances can become blurred at a certain point, while the end result, in my experience, was the same, whichever way I looked at it.

  Apart from them, another one here is the German Kapo,17 with his yellow armband and always immaculately ironed striped outfit, whom I did not see much of, fortunately, but later on, to my utter amazement, the occasional black armband with the humbler inscription of “ Vorarbeiter”18upon it also began to appear in our ranks. I happened to be there when one person from our block, until then not particularly conspicuous as far as I was concerned, nor, to the best of my recollection, particularly highly regarded by or well-known to others, but otherwise a vigorous, hefty man, appeared at supper for the very first time with his brand-new armband. But now, I could not help noticing, he was no longer that anonymous person: friends and acquaintances could hardly get near him, what with all the words and hands of rejoicing, congratulation, and good wishes on his promotion that were being offered from all sides, which he accepted from some but not, I noticed, from others, who
then hastily made themselves scarce. Eventually the most ceremonious moment of all, for me at least, occurred when, with all eyes on him and in the midst of a form of respectful and even, I might say, reverential hush, very dignified, not hurrying a bit, not hastening a bit, he stepped up in a barrage of amazed or envious looks for the second helping that now befitted his rank, and one from the very bottom of the vat at that, which the Stubendienst ladled out for him with the discrimination now due to those granted that right.

  On another occasion, the letters flaunted themselves at me from the arm of a man with a haughty stride and puffed-up chest whom I immediately recognized as the former army officer from Auschwitz. One day I even found myself under his charge, and I can confirm: it’s true that he would go through fire and water for his good men, but loafers and shirkers who got others to do the dirty work could expect no laurels from him, as he himself announced, in those very words, when work started. Still, the next day Bandi Citrom and I considered it better to slip into another work-gang.

  One other change also caught my eye, interestingly enough with the outsiders most of all, the men in the factory, our guards, but particularly one or another of the Prominents within our camp: they altered, I noticed. I did not quite know what this could be put down to at first: somehow they all looked very splendid, at least in my eyes. It was only later, from one piece of evidence and another, that I realized it was us who had changed, naturally; only this had been harder to spot. If I looked at Bandi Citrom, for example, I would notice nothing odd about him. But when I tried to think back and compare him with his initial appearance, back then, on my right in the row, or the very first time at work, his sinews and muscles still rippling, bulging, dimpling, lithely flexing, or ruggedly straining, like an illustration in a biology textbook as it were, then, to be sure, I found it a little hard to credit. Only then did I understand that time can sometimes play tricks on one’s eyes, it seems. That is also how this process, readily measurable though its results were, could escape my notice with an entire family, the Kollmann family, for instance. Everyone in the camp knows them. They hail from a small town in eastern Hungary by the name of Kisvárda, from which many others here have come, and I deduced from the way that people spoke to or about them that they must no doubt have been people of some standing. There are three of them: the father, bald and short, a taller and a shorter son, their faces dissimilar to their father’s but spitting images of each other (and thus, I assume, quite probably of their mama’s), with identical fair whiskers, identical blue eyes. The three of them always go about together, whenever possible, hand in hand. But then, after a while, I noticed that the father kept falling behind, and the two sons had to help him, tugging him along with them by the hand. After yet another while, the father was no longer between them. Soon after that, the bigger one had to tow the smaller one in the same manner. Later still he too vanished, with the bigger one merely dragging himself along, though recently I have not seen even him around anywhere. Like I say, I saw all that, only not the way that I was now able, if I thought about it, to review it, to reel through it like a film so to say, but only frame by frame, becoming habituated to each single image again and again, and so consequently not actually noticing at all. Yet it seems I myself may have changed, since “Leatherware,” whom I spotted one day looking very much at home as he stepped out of the kitchen tent—and I learned that he had indeed found a position for himself among the enviable dignitaries of the potato-peelers—was initially not at all willing to believe it was me. I protested that it really was me, from “Shell,” then went on to ask whether, seeing as it was the kitchen, there happened to be any scraps to eat, some leftovers perhaps, possibly something from the bottom of the cauldrons. He said he would have a look, and though he was not seeking anything for his own part, did I have a cigarette by any chance, since the kitchen Vorarbeiter was “dying for smokes,” as he put it. I admitted that I had none, then he went away. Not too long after, I realized that I would be wasting time to hang around anymore, and that even friendship evidently has its limits, with the boundaries being set by the laws of life—and quite naturally so, no two ways about it. Another time it was me who didn’t recognize a strange creature who was just then coming my way, presumably stumbling along toward the latrines. His convict’s cap slipping down onto his ears, his face all sunken, pinched, and peaky, a jaundiced dewdrop on the tip of his nose. “Fancyman!” I called out: he did not so much as look up. He just shuffled on, one hand holding his trousers up, and I thought to myself: Can you beat that! Who’d have thought it! On yet another occasion, only this time even more jaundiced, even skinnier, the eyes even a touch larger and more feverish, I think it was “Smoker” I caught sight of. It was around then that the Blockältester’s reports at evening and morning roll calls started to include an occasional phrase that was subsequently to become a permanent feature, changing only in respect of the numbers: “ Zwei im Revier,” or “Fünf im Revier,” “Dreizehn im Revier,” 19and so on, and later on also the new notion of shortfalls, the missing, losses, the “ Abgang” that is to say. No, under certain circumstances not even good intentions are enough. When I was still back at home, I had read that in time, and of course with the requisite effort, a person can become accustomed even to a prisoner’s life. That may well be so, I don’t doubt it: for instance, in Hungary let’s say, in some kind of regular, proper civilian prison, or whatever I am supposed to call it. Only in a concentration camp, going by my experience, there is not much chance of that, to be sure. I can confidently say that, in my case at least, it was never for want of effort, for want of good intentions; the trouble is that they simply don’t allow enough time.