Perhaps this will be the only way you will get out of here alive. I stumble, almost crashing to the frozen ground. I mind other people’s business, but I can barely stand on my own two feet, I scolded myself.
Of course, things turned out a little differently from what I had imagined. On the day of our shower, Hans joined us instead of taking a shower on Sunday morning with the other Kapos and Blockälstesters. He stood beside his Piepel, devouring him with his eyes.
The couple was given a wide berth. Hans didn’t even try to cover his excitement. He had brought along a blue-and-white checked towel, a luxury unknown to any ordinary Häftling, and handed it to the boy while the rest of us returned to the Block, wet and naked.
That night I was awakened by a low voice. I was sleeping on the second tier. Above me was a Russian snoring like a sawmill, and below me was the Piepel. I peeked down. Hans was crouching next to the bunk.
“Shh!” he ordered his Piepel.
The bunk creaked when Hans crawled in. I closed my eyes and tried not to care. The boy started sobbing softly. I thought, don’t worry, kid, it will stretch. All three tiers began to sway. Hans was doing him from the side. The SS really needed to switch the color of his triangle.
The Russian’s snoring became irregular as the bunks quaked and Hans panted. I looked at the bunk above me and hoped that the Russian wasn’t prone to seasickness. If he is, he’s going to vomit all over me.
The boy’s eyes were deadened from that morning on, and soon after he contracted pneumonia. Hans went on the hunt for a new Piepel and the fourteen-year-old died alone in the HKB.
Not long after, I found myself with a suitor.
My Kommando was doing odd jobs, laying bricks, hammering spikes into train track tie plates, and tightening track bolts. I was crouched on what would be the base for a railroad track switch, chiseling a gully in the cement for the rod that connected the switch handle to track that hadn’t yet been laid. It was lucky for me that the cement hadn’t completely cured.
A Kapo, whose Kommando was laying electrical cable in freshly dug trenches, had been staring at me for a while. I told myself that he was just suspicious, since I was so far from the other members of my Kommando. But didn’t he have enough “pajamas” of his own to watch over? Suddenly he was standing next to me. With chisel in hand, I got up on tingling legs.
“Boy, look at your shirt. It’s filthy,” he said.
How observant. I had worked and slept in it for over a month.
“I’ll give you a new one.” Give me? I knew it wasn’t my lucky day. What did he want?
“Let’s get out of the wind.”
The Kapo grabbed me by the arm and led me to a secluded area between two buildings. “Take that off.”
He indicated to the scrap of cement bag I had wrapped around my left hand to prevent my skin from sticking to the steel chisel. I did as I was told. The Kapo held my hands.
“Young man, rub your hands before you get frostbite.”
Again, I did as I was told. A moment later he held my hands again.
“That’s better,” he said, and opened his coat, revealing an erection poking out of his unbuttoned fly.
I had seen this coming, but I was surprised that in this weather he could get his battery charged just by looking at me. He pulled me close and had me touch his erection. I had no choice if I wanted to walk back to that slab of concrete.
I stroked his stubby prick with a droopy foreskin while he moved his ass rhythmically. He was breathing heavily, and I could hear his heart dancing the conga. I hoped to get it over with before the Kapo decided he wanted to be satisfied in a different manner.
Finally his knees buckled, he grunted, and ejaculated.
With a grin and a kick he buried the evidence in the sandy soil, turned on his heels, and returned to his Kommando. There goes my shirt, I thought as I picked up my chisel. Well, I wasn’t really expecting one anyhow.
That asshole Hans. Being too old for his taste, Hans had pimped me. It was no accident that he put me on that slab of concrete. Maybe he got the shirt. Then again, it could have all just been shithouse luck.
I went back to work and made sure the job was finished before they lined us up for the march back to camp. I wasn’t going to make a second “date” easy for that Kapo. I didn’t see him the next day or the day after that. When I finally did spot him he seemed just as uninterested in me as I was in him, but it still took me weeks to stop looking over my shoulder for him while I worked. It was a pittance compared to the price Han’s fourteen-year-old paid.
One of the nice things about my life in Drancy, other than Stella, was the fact that I could get cigarettes regularly. This was a big deal for an eighteen-year-old who had started smoking at age ten by making cigarettes with the tobacco from his father’s cigar butts.
Unfortunately, cigarettes were nearly impossible to get in Monowitz, so I joined up with four other Häftlinge from my Block who also had a strong need for tobacco smoke in their lungs. Every morning one of us would make a trade with a Russian black triangle: the margarine that we received with our bread and coffee for a pinch of coarse Russian makhorka (tobacco stems). Since the stems pierced newspaper, we rolled it in squares cut from the middle layer of the triple-lined cement bags that we “organized” from the plant’s construction sites.
Once rolled, the five of us hurried behind the Blocks before morning assembly. The one who traded his margarine got the first puff. He would then exhale the smoke into the mouth of the next man, who would exhale into the mouth next to him. Once the fifth man got his, the cigarette would be passed to the second man and he would inhale and the smoke was passed around again. The cigarette lasted long enough for everyone to get one drag from it.
Exhaling into one another’s mouth was about the unhealthiest thing we could be doing in the middle of winter. When the yellow triangle Czech and red triangle Serb showed up with nasty coughs, we just took our one drag from the cigarette. Still the third, fourth, and fifth men were taking in a lot of germs. Twenty-one days and twenty-one cigarettes later, we wisely dissolved our smoking circle after we all started hacking up phlegm.
In March, I befriended a new arrival, a nineteen-year-old yellow triangle from Holland who was in my Block and Kommando. Peter was tall and unusually skinny for a new arrival. He was lucky that I.G. Farben was demanding more manpower for the Buna plant.
He would have been directed to the left if he had arrived with me.
Peter had been shipped in with his father, whom he missed terribly.
During our lunch break one frosty day I asked him where he had learned to speak fluent German, and without a Dutch accent.
“I’m a German Catholic from Cologne.”
“Then how come you wear a yellow triangle?”
“My father is Jewish. Eight years ago we fled to Holland by hiding on a barge.”
“How about your mother?”
“She’s Catholic. She stayed in Cologne because everything we own is now in her name.”
“Do you miss her?” I pried.
“Before the war she visited us a few times, but I haven’t heard from her since the Germans came into Holland. I worry about her because Cologne has been bombed many times.”