Without warning, the water shot from pleasantly warm to scalding. Men howled. I clasped my hands over my head and tried to get to a wall, but I kept slamming into solid barriers of flesh. We were all hopping from one foot to the other as if performing some ridiculous native rain dance. I worried if I kept jumping about I would lose my ring. A dense vapor filled the room until I could no longer see.
As quickly as it had gone up, the water temperature plummeted.
The steam disappeared. The icy water had me gasping for a breath.
It was futile to try to dodge the cascade, so I stood there shivering with my arms wrapped around myself. Thankfully the torrent stopped, then the door opened and we flooded out.
I grabbed my shoes, which were now filled with water. So much for worrying about soggy footwear, I chided myself. As I went through the door, a prisoner tried to snatch my shoes.
“Loslassen!” (Let go!), the man ordered.
Thinking of the HKB man’s words, I hung on to them. The bastard raised his fist.
“Meine Schuhen, meine Schuhen!” (My shoes, my shoes!), I pleaded.
His kick sent me falling backwards. When I dragged my wet body off the floor, my shoes were lying in a growing pile. The same thing was happening to everyone. I was slowly learning that the instructions of the SS guards weren’t always followed and that there were prisoners in charge who made life more miserable than was even intended.
I lined up with the others. Since no towels were given out, we were all squeegeeing our shivering bodies with our hands. If they wanted us to work in their factory, why were they grinding us down?
The Prussian yelled, “Everybody take a striped uniform!”
Next to the entrance was a huge pile of bundled striped uniforms—shirt, coat, trousers, and a beret-styled cap. Prisoners pushed us toward the door. I blindly grabbed a bundle and had only enough time to put on the shirt, which was old and came down to my knees, before I was shoved outside. On the way down the steps I was thrown a pair of canvas shoes with wooden soles. I never dressed so quickly as I did getting those rags over my wet body.
The pants were short and so tight that I couldn’t button them, and my arms were lost in the sleeves of the coat. I put on the shoes. One was too small and I was swimming in the other. My days as the
“Shithouse Dandy” were definitely over. Looking about, I found some comfort in the fact that I wasn’t the only one with an ill-fitting uniform.
“Los marsch!” commanded the Prussian, and two hundred and forty new Häftlinge (prisoners) followed him down a cinder path.
Though everyone seemed to be stumbling, not walking, I could barely keep up with the group. The damn shoes were burning my feet. Despite the frozen ground, there were men carrying their shoes to walk faster. Soon I was, too. The cinders cut my feet, but at least I wasn’t lagging behind.
A gray dawn was rising behind a range of snow-covered mountains. On one side of us was a long row of Blocks and on the other a barbed-wire fence. Hanging from it was a sign with skull and crossbones and a streak of lightning.
In front of one of the Blocks a band of Häftlinge were loading one of the dump trucks with living skeletons. Half naked, these devastated souls laid on a wooden pushcart waiting their turn to be tossed like trash onto the truck’s bed. They possessed a nightmarish serenity that I had never seen before. Their bodies looked as if life had literally been wrung out of them. They had the legs of storks and their pelvic bones protruded like those of a bankrupt coachman’s cab-horse. They stared at us with eyes so sunk into dark-rimmed sockets that I wondered what kept them from falling into their skulls. We marched past and not a word was spoken. They weren’t being taken to any hospital—that I was sure of. You don’t treat a man like that if you want to nurse him back to health.
“Worse than you can imagine.” It sure wasn’t an exaggeration.
What hardships would we have to endure, and for how long, until we were heaved onto the back of a truck? Had I been stripped of a future along with my warm clothes? Thankfully I was distracted from my dread when we were swallowed up by one of the Blocks.
CHAPTER 6
The barracks smelled newer than the one we left. We were massed in a large, open area in front of rows of three-tier bunks, which were braced at the rafters. Against the wall to my left was a group of hollowed-faced Häftlinge and a couple tables and some wooden chairs. When the last of us was inside, the Prussian left without a word. A little man in his thirties walked over from the wall and stepped onto a stool in front of the rows of bunks. On his striped uniform were a green triangle and a yellow triangle forming the Star of David. It was a relief to see a man standing in front of us who wasn’t reeking of savageness.
“Halt die Fresse!” (Shut up!) he yelled in a high-pitched voice.
“I have important information for you. My name is Herbert. I am the Blockälteste (barracks supervisor). I am the law while you’re in quarantine. Do not forget it. I will give you a few minutes to swap your uniforms and shoes for something better fitting. This will be your only chance.”
Somebody translated it into French so everyone understood that we were now human clothing racks. We eyed one another up and down, then the grabbing, swapping, pulling, and chasing began.
I dashed from one man to another, sometimes trailing a potential fit from one end of the Block to the other while they, too, hunted.
Somehow I managed to get a uniform that hung comfortably on my body. I even got my hands on a pair of shoes that were only a tad big before Herbert called off the hunt.
“Everybody get a pair of Fusslappen” (foot rags), Herbert said, pointing to a tall stack of square rags in a corner. These were to be our socks. Snatching up a pair, I realized it was going to take some practice to fold the rags around my feet before they wouldn’t come apart in my shoes.
“Now hear this!” he yelled. “It’s time to be processed and registered. You’re going to be given a serial number and a color triangle.
They will be sewn to your coat and pants, and you will have the numbers tattooed onto your left forearm.”
An alarmed murmur shot through the room.
“Don’t be sissies. It only hurts a little. Your women are being processed the same way,” Herbert added.
I could picture Stella whimpering and biting her upper lip while being tattooed, as she did when we started to make love.
The Häftlinge standing against the wall moved the tables and chairs behind Herbert; set stacks of green cards, pens, and inkstands on the tables; then sat behind them. Unlike others, I jumped quickly into one of the assembly lines. At the first table, a son of a Warsaw haberdasher sewed the number 172649 onto my jacket and pants. I sat down at the next table, where a German prisoner wrote my name and serial number on a card. From the corner of my eye I watched, alarmed, as the man next to me got tattooed. The bleeding numbers were taking up his whole forearm. The German processing me grabbed my left arm, dipped his pen into his white porcelain inkstand, and attacked my forearm with fast, little jabs. I clenched my teeth, but the physical pain was less than the realization that the numbers 172649 meant I was now officially the property of the Third Reich.
“Will this ever come off?”
He shook his head. “It’s permanent.”