The SS man had noticed now that the five of them were still together and that the cart laden with corpses had not moved. The guard had been bribed but he was coming back, his annoyance evident in his every step. As he got closer Rot made a point of shifting the corpse further towards the back of the heaped pile as though he were finalising the task. Then still looking at the oncoming SS man, but with the distracted air of a nineteenth-century nobleman at rest who suddenly signals to his carriage driver, he gave the side of the cart two swift raps of his knuckles and said, ‘Gentlemen, time’s up.’
*
Memory is a wilful dog. It won’t be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule of its own that you can never know. It can capture you, corner you or it can liberate you. It can leave you howling and it can make you smile. Sometimes it’s funny what you remember.
It was 3.23 am in the Morningside Heights apartment Adam and Diana used to share. Adam was awake again. There was a tap dripping in the bathroom. He heard it but for a while did nothing about it. Perhaps he could kid himself into thinking he wasn’t really awake. It didn’t work. He found himself calculating something, nothing complicated, but it was enough to put paid to all pretence at sleep. Thoughts about his mother, about her childhood, about her ill-fated attempts to meet someone after her divorce from Jake Zignelik, attempts that Adam had tried but failed to shield himself from seeing, had segued into a trivial middle-of-the-night calculation. Almost exactly fourteen years to the day separated Henry Border’s trip to the DP camps of Europe and the visit to Australia of the renowned African American historian and civil rights activist, John Hope Franklin. He had come to Australia to give a series of lectures at the invitation of Professor Zelman Cowen, the then Dean of Law at the University of Melbourne.
It was six years after the US Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board of Education, a case Franklin had worked on with Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and despite having heard negative reports about Australia’s de facto immigration policy, often referred to as the ‘White Australia Policy’, and despite what he knew about the history of Australia’s treatment of its indigenous population, he was amazed to find himself treated like a celebrity everywhere he went. Hotel porters, academics, journalists, they seemed to recognise him and everywhere he went he was treated with a reverence almost approaching awe. No Australian held the historian in higher regard than a young woman, a law student who came to all his Melbourne University lectures and then followed him to Sydney in order to hear him lecture further and to talk with him more. The young woman, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, even struck up a correspondence with him when he returned to the US. It was this that eventually led her to the NAACP–LDF office in New York. There she would meet another civil rights lawyer, Jake Zignelik, and later give birth to his only child, Adam, who, still unable to sleep, speculated that had John Hope Franklin declined Zelman Cowen’s invitation that summer he, Adam, would never have been born. Would the earth have spun any differently? he asked himself in his bed in the glare of an uncaring clock radio.
John Hope Franklin had also been a colleague of William McCray and even then, in his early nineties, he was still in touch with him. Adam wondered how disappointed William would be if he failed to come up with anything new concerning black troops at the liberation of Dachau. When last they’d met, William had been disconsolate over the trial of six African American teenagers in Jena, Louisiana. Adam had wanted to distract him from the trial with reports of his progress concerning the role of black troops in the liberation of concentration camps but he had had very little to tell him. He did tell William about Henry Border, however, and William was very much taken with the story of the Chicago psychologist.
‘Are you telling Charlie all about this?’ William asked. Adam didn’t seem to think there was much point.
‘Nonsense! You’ve got to tell him. I will if you don’t.’
He lay in bed and looked at the clock radio. Now it was 3.47 am. The tap in the bathroom hadn’t stopped dripping. It was this that had first woken him and it was this that he eventually got up to turn off. Once up, Adam, still half asleep, opened the bathroom cabinet and took out the comb Diana had left there. He held it in his hand and looked at the strands of her hair against his palm. This was becoming a ritual.
‘Are you lonely?’ he said inaudibly. ‘What do you eat? Do you cook or do you live on take-out because cooking for one is … pointless, isn’t it? How can you be bothered cooking for one? All those leftovers, they can make you sick if you’re not careful. And then there are the shopping lists, tiny scribbled lists on scraps of paper, urban survival lists, they can make you sick just looking at them. I’m so sorry. Do you know that? Do you ever think about what I’m thinking? I was never unfaithful to you. That doesn’t count for anything now, does it? I should have been unfaithful and then confessed it. The end result might have been the same but it would have at least been understandable. Do you ever think about me? Or have you already let go? Sometimes I picture two clasped hands slowly loosening their grip. Slowly, slowly, where once they held on to each other they merely touch each other. Then through the agency of inertia, or something, or gravity, the gravitational attraction of neighbouring bodies, so to speak, they begin to drift apart. One barely moves at all while the other drifts away.’
Diana didn’t say anything.
‘I’ve taken out a personal loan. I went to the bank and got a loan to fund a return trip to Melbourne to speak to a woman there, one of Border’s women, one of the Holocaust survivors he interviewed in the summer of ‘46. It might be a complete waste of time and money. I didn’t tell the bank that I already know that my employment is limited. Is this the kind of confidence you want me to have? I think I have it now … in my work. It’s to do with the black troops at Dachau I’m following up and with other things that Border has led me to. I’ve got something now, quite a lot. It’s almost too much. If only I’d found this sooner. It goes around and around in my head. How do you sleep? Do you wake up knowing I’m sorry? Or have you let go?’
From his office the next morning Adam called Diana’s mobile phone. It was turned off. Perhaps she was already teaching. He left a message. He wanted to meet up with her. Dinner, a drink, whatever she wanted.
‘Choose a place, somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen is fine with me. I really want to talk to you.’
*
The Sonderkommando resistance members had not held out much hope of Henryk Mandelbrot and Chaim Neuhof succeeding in their attempt to persuade the joint Auschwitz Military Council to agree to bring forward its plan for a camp-wide uprising. The murder of 200 Sonderkommando men in September had done nothing to change the thinking of the non-Jewish resistance. In early October the situation grew even more urgent when the Sonderkommando Kapos, the SS-appointed prisoners in charge, were commanded to furnish the SS within twenty-four hours with a list of 300 Sonderkommando men. Scharführer Busch, an SS Lance Sergeant, announced that the chosen 300 were to be taken out from Auschwitz-Birkenau to clear rubble and debris from a nearby town that had been badly damaged in an Allied air raid. Not one member of the Sonderkommando believed this.
Scharführer Busch had in effect given the Kapos twenty-four hours to make a list of 300 of their colleagues to be murdered and left the Kapos to their own devices to sort it out. Each man wondered to himself, ‘Have I ever done anything to offend one of the Kapos?’
The men of the Sonderkommando stayed up all night. They argued with each other. They pleaded with the Kapos and with anyone they thought capable of influencing the Kapos such as the two Zalmans, Lewental and Gradowski, two of the longest serving members of the Sonderkommando. The two were impressed by the criterion that Henryk Mandelbrot suggested should be used in drawing up the list. The Kapo they had known best, Kaminski, had recently been shot on suspicion of sabotage but they went to another Kapo, o
ne who was part of the Sonderkommando resistance, a man named Kalniak. To Kalniak they put Mandelbrot’s suggestion.
‘Surely,’ Mandelbrot had suggested, ‘the first men to keep off the list are the ones who are most likely, mentally and physically, to be able to fight in the event of an uprising.’
‘That would make sense,’ Kalniak commented, ‘if there was any realistic hope of an uprising.’
‘But still –’ and this was all Gradowski got to say privately to Kalniak before a prisoner fought his way past Lewental to plead with Kalniak. Whatever Kalniak’s real influence with or standing among the other Sonderkommando Kapos, the fact that a fight had broken out just for the opportunity to plead one’s case to him suddenly elevated his stature with tens of desperate men who had seen it. Perhaps talking to Kalniak could keep you off the list.
The next day two of the Sonderkommando prisoners whose task it was to bring food to the Sonderkommando were told to give a message to a certain prisoner in the kitchen detail. This prisoner was in the resistance and he was told to get a message urgently to the Auschwitz Military Council explaining the situation concerning the 300 men and to plead one last time for the camp-wide uprising to begin that day. The message came back within an hour and a half. Not only would the Auschwitz Military Council not participate in an uprising that day but it urged those Sonderkommando resistance members who were not on the list of 300 also not to take part in any uprising. The 300 men, whoever they were, on the list to be given to the SS, were to go to their deaths knowingly, without fighting back and without any assistance from anyone, not even from the other Sonderkommando men. That was the message from the camp-wide resistance, the Auschwitz Military Council.
‘Perhaps Kalniak was right,’ Henryk Mandelbrot heard Zalman Lewental say to Zalman Gradowski.
They were lining up in formation in front of Crematorium IV as they had so many times before but they were doing it very slowly. Had the SS noticed? Everyone was twitchy. No one had slept. A list had been made. One of the Kapos had it. Which Kapo? All anyone knew was that it was too late to influence anybody now. Scharführer Busch was there with a group of SS guards. Did these SS men really think that any of the men lined in front of them, men who had day after day, month after month been forced to witness and participate in the deception and in the mass murder of so many hundreds of thousands of innocents, did any of these SS men really think that a single Sonderkommando member thought for a moment that the 300 men whose names were about to be handed over were going to go out to clear rubble?
Neither Lewental nor Mandelbrot saw any of the Kapos hand a list to anyone but somehow one of the SS men had it and they saw this SS man hand it over to Scharführer Busch. There were men there who knew for certain that their names were on the list. Some of these men had made preparations. They might have trembled lined up there but they had secreted implements, crude weapons of various kinds on their persons. Those there who had worked the night shift in Crematorium IV had, in what they knew to be their last hours, wedged and crammed rags soaked in wood-alcohol and in oil in whatever spaces they could in the crematorium, between the rafters, in the coke room, everywhere. The soaked rags were even placed under some of the three-tier wooden bunks in their barracks block. They hadn’t forgotten that not only people burn, wood burns too. Then there were the tins, small tins partially filled with the gunpowder stolen by the women of the Pulverraum and smuggled out by Rosa Rabinowicz and later others. If an uprising started, if a building used for killing was set on fire, perhaps other prisoners, not just Sonderkommando men but prisoners all across Auschwitz-Birkenau and maybe even prisoners in some of the subcamps would see it. Maybe others would rise up too. Could that happen? How could they know? This was like no place they had ever known.
How many minutes did they have left to live? Scharführer Busch began calling out names from the list. How did Chaim Neuhof’s name get on it? As doomed men began stepping slowly forward, it occurred to Scharführer Busch that the formation in its entirety seemed somewhat short, that men were missing. Suspecting that some of them must have been hiding, he dispatched several SS men to Crematorium IV to search for the missing prisoners. The rags, the weapons, men who may have been hiding there, everything was about to be discovered.
There was nothing to wait for any more, nothing. Whether Chaim Neuhof was the first to realise this no one will ever know. But he was the first to act on this realisation. From the ranks of the condemned men he called out ‘Hoorah!’ and with an axe that he had managed to hide in his pants he lunged at one of the SS men about to search Crematorium IV. Suddenly a torrent of stones, gravel and assorted objects came flying at the SS men from the ranks of the prisoners chosen to be ‘transferred’. Some of the SS retreated from the attacking Sonderkommando men, two fleeing on bicycles. Others began firing indiscriminately at both the condemned and the other Sonderkommando men.
Nobody now was waiting for anything. Sonderkommando men from both groups began attacking the SS and before long smoke could be seen coming from Crematorium IV. This was not the usual smoke from the burning of corpses. This smoke was unprecedented. Crematorium IV was on fire. Not Jews for once, it was the building itself that was burning. There were explosions too. The Jews were tossing grenades of some kind. And even as Sonderkommando men were falling before a rain of bullets, people, prisoners of all nationalities from other parts of the camp, stopped what they were doing to look up. Jews were fighting back. Inconceivable though it was, this was no fantasy. Somehow these Sonderkommando men were destroying one of the crematoria even amid a ceaseless hail of bullets.
Over at Crematorium II the Sonderkommando men heard the wail of a siren above the non-stop gunfire. In astonishment they saw that Crematorium IV was on fire. Believing that this was the start of the long hoped-for uprising, they attacked the SS men guarding them. Hidden caches of weapons including the homemade grenades were retrieved in the commotion. A pair of long-hidden insulated pliers was dug up and a hole large enough for people to get through was cut in the electrified perimeter fence. The SS were so shocked to be attacked in what appeared to them to be an organised uprising that in the time it took them to implement a coordinated response a large number of the Sonderkommando were able to reach the hole in the fence. To stem the firing the SS were now directing in that vicinity, the prisoners there lobbed grenades at them. By this time there were Sonderkommando men on the other side of the fence. Not knowing which way to run they followed the first to escape and headed towards the nearby town of Rajsko.
Shot at by the SS pursuing them, many were killed or wounded, but some of them made it the two kilometres to Rajsko where, in terror, in exhilaration, they took shelter in a barn they’d come upon. Those Poles in Rajsko who in the middle of an October afternoon saw these men run into the barn could not understand what they were witnessing. They saw the SS arrive with dogs and try to break into the barn but the Sonderkommando men had had just enough time to bar the very stout door. Temporarily safe, the escapees inside the barn reassessed their position. What to do next depended on what was happening outside. Perhaps other parts of the fence had been breached. Perhaps prisoners were resisting all over Auschwitz. Perhaps the Russians had finally arrived and were engaging the SS. Maybe this had been the moment when the Polish Home Army had joined with the Auschwitz Military Council and the SS were under siege. Perhaps this was the beginning of the end of this nightmare. They looked at each other. The Nazis seemed to have given up their attempt to get into the barn. Had the local Poles, the men and women of Rajsko, taken up arms? No, there was no resistance from the people of Rajsko, not that afternoon, none that these panting men could hear over their own breathing and the barking of the dogs outside.
The people of Rajsko were civilians. They didn’t fight. The Sonderkommando men inside the barn at Rajsko smelled a burning smell, not of corpses but of wood. The men of the Auschwitz Military Council were not on hand, nor the local branch of the Polish Home Army. The SS had set fire to the barn. As the f
lames gained control and the heat and smoke became unbearable the Sonderkommando men were forced to open the door and run for their lives. The Russians were not there, but some of the townspeople of Rajsko were there to see these men run as fast as they could out of the flame-filled barn, only to be gunned down by the machine guns of the waiting SS.
Back inside Auschwitz, some of the night shift from the Weichsel Union Metallwerke factory came out of their barracks blocks to see smoke coming from Crematorium IV. It had really happened. In Kanada Rosa Rabinowicz was able to see it too. In the furthest parts of the camp they saw it. Others just heard about it but they all exulted in it. The Sonderkommando, Jews, had fought back. One of the crematoria, its gas chamber and its ovens, had been destroyed. Across the camp an almost surreal pride rippled through the prisoner population.
Once the SS had received reinforcements the uprising was quickly subdued. Those Sonderkommando men not already killed either at the Rajsko barn or in the area of the crematoria were made to lie face-down on the ground. True: the fence had been cut, explosives made of smuggled gunpowder had been used, SS men had been wounded, some had been killed. But while all this had been going on, nobody other than the Sonderkommando had so much as cursed the SS. Henryk Mandelbrot lay face-down on the ground as did all the surviving Sonderkommando men. No longer in shock, the SS were merely furious, intent on revenge. Mandelbrot listened to the sound of the gunshots getting nearer. He heard the sounds of the feet of the SS man, the designated shooter, getting nearer. With his face in the dirt he listened and calculated that the SS were shooting every third Sonderkommando man. One, then two, then a shot. Then again, one, then two, then a shot. Who would be left to tell the world what had happened here on the afternoon of 7 October 1944? One, then two, then a shot. Who would be left when this was over? One, then two, then a shot.