Back at our Block that night, before das Essen (our meal), the Blockälteste announced that those Häftlinge not working at their skilled professions or trades were to report to the Schreibstube (Administration Building) in the morning. I had told the Häftling who filled out my green card that I was an electrician. It was a lie, but I knew enough of the basics that I figured I could con my way through. The prospect of not working ten, twelve hours in the brutal Siberian blast kept me awake most of the night. Only the Kommandos working outside returned to camp carrying corpses. The odds of my survival would definitely rise if I could pass muster as a craftsman.
A few mornings later I lined up in the Appelplatz (roll-call square) with the Elektriker Kommando. I marched with them to Buna’s main generator, which was housed in a tall red brick building with four metal smokestacks that looked like they belonged on an ocean liner. We entered a warm, brightly lit hall resonating from the hum of four monstrous turbines. The wooden soles of our shoes were like a stampede of jackhammers as we climbed a metal staircase to the tool room and workshop.
The Häftlinge went to their workstations. The Kapo turned to me.
“Folge mir” (Follow me), the green triangle ordered. He handed me a schematic from his desk. “What do you read?”
I nervously looked over the diagram. In my physics class I had learned the equations and symbols for volts, amps, watts, and ohms, so it was easy to point out the capacitors, resistors, switches, and outlets. For some of the more technical items on the print I spit out names with more bluff than knowledge. The Kapo smiled.
“Join that detail over there.”
I walked over to a Vorarbeiter and four Häftlinge who were dragging out their toolboxes. They were all German red or green triangles.
“How do you bend conduit?” the stocky Bavarian Vorarbeiter asked.
These men weren’t in the business of wasting any time with formal introductions.“With a tube bender,” I blurted.
“If you don’t have one?”
I smiled; this had happened to me at home. “I look for anything with the right radius, I cap one end, fill the conduit with sand so it won’t collapse when I bend it, then cap the other end.”
“How do you push the wire through?”
The Vorarbeiter wasn’t going to nail me on this question, either.
“I push a snake through the conduit, attach the strands of wire to the snake, then pull it back.”
“From the box in the corner get me two transformers, one for two hundred and fifty volts to one hundred and twenty volts and another for eighteen volts.”
When I came back with the right transformers, the Vorarbeiter seemed satisfied that he could depend on me not to screw up.
As we prepared the wiring for a new building that morning, I was amazed by the jovial mood of my co-workers. On their faces were the first smiles I had seen since my arrival. It was a startling contrast to the gloom that hung over Kommando 136. Then, again, it’s hard to smile when your face is frozen. At lunch I discovered one reason these slave laborers seemed not to mind their work.
Their soup was a much thicker and tastier fare than anything I had eaten so far. They all laughed when I licked my bowl.
“Speckjäger, haben einen Nachschlag” (Bacon hunter, have a second helping), grinned the Kapo.
“May I really?”
“Have two; there’s plenty left.”
No wonder there wasn’t a sickly skeleton in the bunch. Relatively speaking, I was in paradise.
At the end of the day, the Kapo handed me a small industrial fuse the likes of which I had never seen before.
“Is it any good?” he asked.
I looked through the glass of the porcelain fuse.
“Sure,” I said confidently.
“Check it again. You see those little black specks? This fuse has a manufacturing defect. It blew the moment we screwed it in the socket. You’re not very observant. We would’ve wasted a day searching for an open line.”
That damn fuse sank me. The next day I was back shivering my nuts off with Kommando 136.
It was early evening. The north wind had frozen everything that the pale winter sun had thawed, making our usual path back to camp a sheet of ice. By threes, we walked on one of the many tentacles of train track criss-crossing the Buna plant. Ice splinters falling from the electric wires overhead stung my face. The wind cut through my “pajamas”—camp slang for our striped uniforms—chilling my bones, which hardly had any meat left on them. As usual my stomach was throbbing with hunger, but it had been such an exceptionally exhausting day of fitting panels of cement and sea-weed up onto the skeletal frame of another warehouse building that all I wanted was my infested straw mattress. I hoped they wouldn’t make us take a shower when we returned to our Block. There was no way my feeble legs could carry my wet, naked body fast enough across the one hundred yards of frozen cinders that lay between the showers and our Block. It would be a sure way of catching pneumonia.
I heard bells, and turned to see two Polish peasants, bundled in warm furs and smoking pipes, passing by on a sleigh. They were probably on their way back from picking up the garbage at the civilian kitchen. The short longhaired horses pulling them trotted with heads down, noses steaming, and tails whipping in the wind. It reminded me of the illustrations in my mother’s copy of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I looked at the Häftlinge ahead of me. No holiday picture here. The dragging gray line of misery was more akin to the painting of Napoleon’s retreat across the Berezina River. Our Kapo Hans strutted in his high polished boots with his new Piepel (“errand boy”) by his side. It had been no surprise that Hans had dumped his former Piepel, a deformed little beggar, when this fourteen-year-old Dutch kid with big green eyes arrived in the camp.
Hans held the boy by the arm as we took a shortcut along a cluster of butane tanks and twisting pipelines with safety valves that let off jets of steam that smelled like cider. He then put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and let it slip down his back, affectionately squeezing his waist. The Piepel stepped away, glancing at Hans with guileless eyes and a smile. What innocence, I thought. You don’t understand at all, do you, kid? Yes, Hans is fond of you, but not in the way you think. I’m sure you feel lucky that you don’t have to work like the rest of us, but soon enough you’ll learn the price.
Hans will take you to a secluded spot while we work. The Vorarbeiter will ensure that his Kapo isn’t interrupted.
Like a father, Hans will sit you tenderly on his lap. Panting with excitement, he’ll whisper in your ear all that he can do for you. His hands will press your body. Your few carelessly sewn buttons will pop off. While he holds you with one strong arm, he’ll wet your bottom with his saliva, and before you realize what’s happening, you’ll feel your intestines being pushed through your stomach. I would like to open your eyes, you beardless boy, but truly—what business is it of mine? Don’t I have enough troubles of my own?