Carrion Comfort

  “In May, most of the German and foreign Jews were shipped south to Oswiecim. Auschwitz. Few of us had ever heard of Oswiecim until the transports began rolling out of our ghetto to it.

  “Until that spring, our ghetto had been used as a massive holding pen. Now the trains rolled four times a day. As a member of the Judenrat, my father was forced to help supervise the roundup and expulsion of thousands. It was very orderly. My father hated it. He would work around the clock at the hospital as if performing penance.

  “Our turn came in late June, about the time we usually would have left for Uncle Moshe’s farm. The seven of us were ordered to report to the train station. My mother and my younger brother Josef cried. But we went. I think that my father was relieved.

  “We were not sent to Auschwitz. We went north to Chelmno, a village less than seventy kilometers from Lodz. I had once had a playmate, a provincial little fellow named Mordechai, whose family had come from Chelmno. I learned much later that it was at Chelmno that the Germans had carried out their first experiments with gassing . . . just that past winter as poor Stefa had lain dying of typhus.

  “Unlike so many of the stories we had heard about the sealed transports, our trip was not unpleasant. We made it in a few hours. We were squeezed tightly into train cars, but they were regular passenger cars. The day was very beautiful. It was June 24. When we arrived it was as if we had traveled to Uncle Moshe’s. The Chelmno station was tiny, hardly more than a country depot surrounded by thick, green forest. German soldiers led us to waiting trucks, but the soldiers seemed relaxed, almost jovial. There was none of the pushing and shouting we were used to in Lodz. We were driven several kilometers to a large estate where a camp had been set up. Once there we were registered— I clearly remember the rows of clerks’ desks set outside on the gravel and the sound of the birds singing— and then we were segregated by sex for showers and disinfection. I was impatient to catch up to the other men and I never saw my mother and four sisters disappear behind the fence to the women’s area.

  “We were told to disrobe and stand in line. I was very embarrassed because I had only begun to mature that winter. I do not remember being frightened. The day was warm, we had been promised a meal after we had cleaned up, and the nearby forest and camp noises gave a festive, almost carnival atmosphere to the day. Ahead in a clearing I could see a large van with bright illustrations of animals and trees painted on the sides. Our line had started toward the clearing when an SS man, a young lieutenant with thick glasses and a shy face, came down the line separating the sick, the very young, and the older men from the stronger ones. The lieutenant hesitated when he came to me. I was still small for my age, but I had eaten relatively well that winter and had begun a growth spurt in the spring. He smiled and waved a small baton to send me to the shortened line of able-bodied men. Father was also sent to the line. Josef, who was only eight, was to stay with the children and old men. Josef began to cry and Father refused to leave him. I returned to the line to stand by Father and Josef. The young SS man waved to a guard. Father told me to return with the others. I refused.

  “This was to be the only time in my life that Father struck me. He pushed me and said, ‘Go!’ I shook my head and held my place in line. The guard, a heavyset sergeant, was puffing toward us. Father slapped me once, very hard, and repeated, ‘Go!’ Shocked, hurt, I stumbled the few paces to the shorter line before the guard arrived. The SS man moved on. I was very angry at Father. I saw no reason why we could not have showered together. He had humiliated me in front of the other men. I watched through tears of anger as he left, his bare back pale in the morning light, carrying Josef who had quit crying and was looking around. Father looked back at me once before he turned out of sight with the line of children and old men.

  “The rest of us, about a fifth of the men who had arrived that day, were not disinfected. We were marched directly to barracks and given rough prisoner uniforms.

  “Father did not appear that afternoon or evening and as I was going to sleep in the filthy barracks that night I remember crying from loneliness. I was sure that by separating us in line, Father had condemned me to being kept from the part of the camp where families stayed.

  “In the morning we were fed cold potato soup and grouped into work details. My group was led to the forest. A pit had been dug there. It was over two hundred feet long, forty feet wide, and it was at least fifteen feet deep. I could tell by the freshly turned soil that other pits had recently been filled in nearby. The smell should have told me everything, but I continued to deny it to myself until the first of the day’s vans arrived. They were the same vans I had seen the day before.

  “You see, Chelmno had been a test case. From what they had learned, Himmler had ordered gas chambers for prussic acid to be installed there, but that summer they were still using carbon monoxide in sealed chambers and the brightly colored vans.

  “Our job was to separate the bodies, actually pry them apart, throw them in the pit, and spread the dirt and lime before the next loads arrived. The gas vans were not efficient. Frequently as many as half the victims survived the exhaust fumes and had to be shot at the edge of the pit by the Totenkopfverbände— the Death’s Head Troopers— who waited there, smoking and joking with one another between van arrivals. Even then, some of the people survived both the gassing and the shooting and were buried while still stirring.

  “I returned to the barracks that evening covered with excrement and blood. That night I considered dying but decided instead that I would live. Live despite all, live in the face of anything, live for no other reason than to live.

  “I lied and said that I was a dentist’s son and that I had been trained as a dentist myself. The kapos laughed at the idea of such a young apprentice, but within the next week I was put on the tooth detail. Three other Jews and I searched the naked bodies for rings, gold, anything valuable. We probed anuses and vaginas with steel hooks. Then I used a pair of pliers to remove gold teeth and fillings. Often I was sent down into the Pit to work. An SS sergeant named Bauer used to toss clods of dirt on my head and laugh. He had two gold teeth himself.

  “After a week or two, Jews on the burial details were routinely shot and new arrivals sent to replace them. Perhaps because I was fast and efficient at my work, I stayed nine weeks at the Pit. Every morning I was sure it would be my turn. Every night in the barracks as the older men were saying Kaddish and I could hear cries of ‘Eli, Eli,’ being sent up from dark bunks, I made desperate deals with a God I no longer believed in. ‘Just one more day,’ I would say. ‘Just one more day.’ But it was my own will to survive that I most believed in. Perhaps I was suffering from the solipsism of adolescence, but I was convinced that if I believed strongly enough in my own continued existence, then it would be necessarily come to pass.

  “In August the camp was enlarged and for some reason I was transferred to the Waldkommando, the forest brigade. We cut trees, tore up stumps, and quarried stone to build roads. Every few days an entire line of returning workers would be led off to the vans or straight to the Pit. In that way the brigade was changed. By the first snowfall in November I had been Waldkommando longer than anyone except the old kapo, Karski.”

  “What is a kapo?” asked Natalie. “A kapo is a Jew with a whip.”

  “And they helped the Germans?”

  “Learned treatises have been written about kapos and their identification with their Nazi masters,” said Saul. “Stanley Elkins and others have looked into this kind of concentration camp submission and how it compares to the docility and identification of black American slaves. Just this September I was part of a panel discussing the so-called Stockholm Syndrome, wherein hostages not only identify with their captors but provide active support.”

  “Oh, like whatshername, Patty Hearst,” said Natalie. “Yes. And this . . . this dominance through force of will has been an obsession with me for many years. But we will speak more of this later. For now, let me say only that if there is anything at all to
be said in my favor for the time I was in the camps, I did not become a kapo.

  “In November of 1942, the camp improvement was completed and I was moved from the temporary barracks back to the main compound. I was put on the Pit detail. The ovens had been completed by this time, but they had underestimated the numbers of Jews arriving on the transports so the vans and the Pit were still in use. They no longer required my services as a dentist to the dead. I spread lime, shivered in the early winter cold, and waited. I knew that it had to be just a matter of days until I joined those I was burying each day.

  “Then one Thursday night, November 19, 1942, something happened.” Saul fell silent. After a few seconds he rose and walked to the fireplace. The fire was almost out. “Natalie, would you have a drink of something stronger than coffee? Sherry, perhaps?”

  “Of course,” said Natalie. “Would brandy do?”

  “Wonderful.”

  When she returned a moment later with a large brandy snifter almost filled with brandy, Saul had stirred the coals, replenished the wood, and coaxed the fire back to life.

  “Thank you, my dear.” He swirled the amber liquid and inhaled deeply before drinking. The fire crackled and spit. “On Thursday— I am reasonably sure it was November 19, 1942— five Germans came into our barracks late at night. They had come before. Each time they had removed four men. The men were never seen again. Prisoners in each of the other seven barracks in our compound had told us that the same was true there. We had no idea why the Nazis would choose such a manner of liquidation when thousands went openly to the Pit each day, but there was much we did not understand. There were whispers of medical experiments.

  “This night there was a young Oberst, a colonel, with the guards. And this night they chose me.

  “I had decided to fight if they came for me at night. I realize that this seems in violation of my decision to live in spite of everything, but there was something about the thought of being taken out into the dark which panicked me, drove all hope from me. I was prepared to fight. When the guards ordered me out of my bunk I knew that I had only seconds to live. I was prepared to try to kill at least one of the swine before they murdered me.

  “It did not happen. Instead the Oberst ordered me out and I obeyed. Or rather, my body disobeyed me. It was not merely cowardice or submission, the Oberst entered my mind. I know of no other way to put it. I felt it, as surely as I was prepared to feel the bullets which never came. I felt him move my muscles, shuffle my feet across the floor, and take my body from the barracks. And all the while the SS guards were laughing.

  “It is impossible to describe what I felt then. It could only be called a mindrape and even that does not convey the sense of violation. I did not then . . . nor do I now . . . believe in demonic possession or supernatural occurrences. What happened then was the result of some monstrous but very real psychic or psychological ability to directly control the minds of other human beings.

  “We were loaded aboard a truck. This in itself was incredible. Except for the brief, deceptive ride from Chelmno station, Jews were never allowed to ride in vehicles. Slaves were much cheaper than petrol in Poland that winter.

  “They drove us into the forest. There were sixteen of us in the truck, including one young woman from the women’s barracks. The mindrape had ended for the time being, but it had left behind a residue more foul and shameful than the excrement I had been smeared with daily while on Pit detail. I could tell from the manner and whispers from the other Jews that they had not yet experienced it. To be honest, I doubted my sanity at that moment.

  “The trip took less than an hour. There was one guard in the back of the truck with us. He carried a machine-pistol. Camp guards almost never carried automatic weapons while in the compound because of the danger if they were seized. Had I not been recovering from the terrible experience in the barracks I would have attempted to overpower the German or at least leap from the truck. But the mere unseen presence of the Oberst in the cab of the truck filled me with a terror deeper than any I had known in months.

  “It was after midnight when we arrived at an estate larger even than the mansion around which Chelmno had been built. It was deep in the forest. Americans would call the place a castle, but it was more and less than that. It was the kind of ancient Great Hall which one occasionally encounters in the darkest forests of my country: a great heap of stones, old beyond our history, tended and added onto for countless generations by reclusive families which trace their lineage back to pre-Christian times. The two trucks stopped and we were herded into a cellar not far from the main hall. From the sight of the military vehicles parked in what remained of the once-formal gardens and from the raucous noise emanating from the hall, I surmised that the Germans had commandeered the estate as a rest and recreation center for privileged units. Indeed, once inside and locked in a lightless cellar, I heard a Lithuanian Jew from the other truck whisper that he knew the regimental markings of the vehicles. They belonged to Einsatzgruppe 3— a Special Action Group— which had liquidated entire villages of Jews near the man’s home in Dvensk. The Einsatzgruppen were regarded with fear and awe even by the SS Totenkopfverbände which carried out the camp exterminations.

  “Some time later the guards returned with torches. There were thirty-two of us in the cellar. We were divided into two equal groups and led upstairs to separate rooms. There our group was dressed in rough, red-dyed tunics with white symbols on the front. Guards ordered us into specific uniforms. My symbol— a tower or baroque lamppost— meant nothing to me. The man next to me wore the silhouette of an elephant raising its right front foot.

  “We were brought to the Great Hall. There we were greeted with a scene out of the Middle Ages by way of Hieronymous Bosch; hundreds of SS and Einsatzgruppen murderers lounged and gambled and whored where they pleased. Polish peasant girls, some only children, were the servants and slaves of the men in gray. Torches had been thrust into brackets on the walls and the tableau was illuminated as in a flickering fever dream of Hell. Scraps of food lay rotting where they had been thrown. Centuries-old tapestries were stained and sooted from the open fires. A once-magnificent banquet table had been almost hacked into pieces where the Germans had carved their names with bayonets. Men lay passed out and snoring on the floor. I watched as two enlisted men urinated on a rug which must have been brought back from the Holy Land in one of the Crusades.

  “The hall was huge, but the center of it, an area about eleven meters long by eleven meters wide, was conspicuously empty. The floor was tiled black and white, each tile four feet to a side. At opposite ends of this open square, just below where the balconies began, two heavy chairs had been set on stone slabs. In one of these thrones sat the young Oberst. He was pale, blond, and Aryan. His hands were white and thin. In the other chair sat an old man, as ancient looking as the heap of rocks around us. He was also wearing an SS uniform, that of a general, but the effect was more of a wizened wax dummy dressed in a baggy uniform by malicious children.

  “The other truckload of Jews had been led in from a side door. They were dressed in light blue tunics with black symbols similar to ours. I could see that the woman with that group was wearing a light blue gown with the symbol of a crown or coronet on the front. I realized then what was happening. In the state of exhaustion and constant fear I had reached, there was no insanity too bizarre to be believed.

  “We were ordered to our squares. I was a pawn, a white king’s bishop’s pawn. I stood three meters in front of and to the right of the Oberst’s throne, facing the frightened-looking Lithuanian Jew who was the black bishop’s pawn.

  “The shouting and singing was silenced. German troopers gathered around, jostling for a place near the border of the square. Some climbed the stairways or crowded the balconies for a better view. For half a minute there was silence except for the sputtering of the torches and the heavy breathing of the throng. We stood on our appointed squares, thirty-two starved and frightened Jews, white-faced, staring, breathing shal
lowly, waiting for what ever would come.

  “The Old Man leaned forward slightly on his chair and gestured with an open palm toward the Oberst. The younger man smiled slightly and nodded his head. The game began.

  “The Oberst nodded again and the pawn to my left, a gaunt, older man with gray stubble on his cheeks, lurched two squares forward. The Old Man responded by advancing his own king’s pawn. I could tell by watching the way the poor, confused prisoners moved that they were not in control of their own bodies.

  “I had played a little chess with my father and uncle. I knew the standard openings. There were no surprises here. The Oberst glanced to his right and a heavyset Pole wearing the Knight’s tunic came forward to stand in front of me. The Old Man sent out the knight on his queen’s side. The Oberst brought our bishop, a small man with his left arm ban daged, out from behind me to stand on the fifth rank of the knight’s file. The Old Man advanced his queen’s pawn one square.

  “I wished then that I was wearing any symbol save that of a pawn. The squat form of the peasant in front of me, the knight, offered only the slightest sense of safety. To my right, another pawn turned to look behind him and then grimaced in pain as the Oberst forced him to face forward. I did not turn around. My legs were beginning to shake.

  “The Oberst moved our queen’s pawn two ranks forward to stand next to the old pawn on the king’s file. Our queen’s pawn was a boy, barely a teenager, and he glanced furtively to the left and right without turning his head. The peasant knight in front of me was the only protection the boy had from the Old Man’s pawn.

  “The Old Man made a slight gesture with his left hand and his bishop stepped out in front of the Dutch woman who was his queen. The bishop’s face was very pale. The Oberst’s fifth move brought out our other knight. I could not see the man’s face. The SS men gathered around were beginning to shout and clap after every move as if they were spectators at a football match. I heard snatches of conversation in which the Oberst’s opponent was referred to as Der Alte, ‘The Old One.’ The Oberst was being cheered as Der Meister.