I mumbled matter-of-factly, “I guess you were starving in Holland, too. You don’t look good.”
“No, we were doing okay in Groningen, but when we were discovered by the Gestapo I got a bad infection. My father told them that I’m not Jewish, but the agent screamed that a leopard doesn’t change his spots.”
Peter bragged to me constantly about his father. It seemed that he was the owner of a prosperous factory that produced women’s corsets, and Peter believed that he had landed a good job in Auschwitz.
“I’m sure they’re taking advantage of his excellent bookkeeping skills,” he would say time and time again.
I didn’t have the heart to inform Peter that he was living in a dream world. I assumed he used this feeble thread of hope the way I did with my thoughts of Stella, to keep the will to live strong. But amid the stories of camping trips and his father’s keen business mind, I could sense that Peter was becoming more and more distraught. Against my advice, he went to the Schreibstube and asked to be reunited with his father in the main camp.
A few days later I openly cried when he waved to me from the back of a truckful of Muselmänner. You fool, I wanted to scream.
Was he that delusional that he couldn’t see that no one his father’s age ever escaped the gas chambers? Or was he crazy like a fox, committing suicide without offending his faith? I would never know. The answer disappeared in smoke.
My memory was failing. It was as if someone had wiped my eighteen-year-old mind with a blackboard eraser, leaving me with only the faint outlines of my family, friends, and classmates. Stella was slowly becoming a phantom. I had difficulty seeing her spirited eyes, hearing her voice, smelling her scent, and feeling her touch.
There was only one image that had become more vivid, and it savagely haunted me: food. In my mind, I could conjure up the most complicated recipes. Delicious and appetizing smells would fill my nostrils, and my mouth would water until my salivary glands were close to cramping, but it did nothing for my belly. I couldn’t survive for much longer on the meager pittance of food they gave us.
Every week I was becoming noticeably thinner. I had to find some means of supplementing my rations, but it wasn’t time to trade my one and only possession on the black market. Not when there was a pyramid of cabbages behind the camp’s kitchen guarded by only one green triangle armed with a stick, and not when there were two French yellow triangles in my Block willing to help me “organize” a few heads.
On a moonless night, when the chain of searchlights was providing the only illumination, Antoine, Jules, and I eased out of our bunks. We met next to the red triangle Pole working a shift as night watchman. With the promise of a fistful of cabbage, he didn’t see us walk out. Antoine was our goat; he had drawn the short straw.
Jules and I laid in wait behind one of the Blocks as he crept toward the kitchen. Suddenly, he jumped out from the shadows. The guard went after him, and Jules and I threw ourselves onto the pile of cabbages. Antoine took a few knocks, but we were victorious. Behind our Block, we munched away like rabbits. Though the insides of the cabbages were frozen and we had no salt for seasoning, it was an amazingly delicious salad.
“Links, zwei, drei, vier, links!” (Left, two, three, four, left!) Hans commanded. As we did every night, we goose-stepped in rows of five through the camp’s gate. My feet felt like bricks as I kicked them into the air. As always the Lagerälteste (camp administrator) and Lagerkapo (head of camp) were standing side by side inside the gate. The Lagerälteste was the Prussian with the riding-crop “interpreter.” He ensured that the affairs of the camp were to the boches’ liking and dealt out the punishment when they weren’t. The Lagerkapo, who I figured for some Berlin garbageman, had a red triangle with the number 1 and was in charge of the Kommandos working inside the camp, which included the kitchen and HKB.
These two senior Hftlinge were like night and day. Where the Lagerälteste was a sharply dressed, sadistic matinee idol, the Lagerkapo looked like a wallowing pig with his big, upturned nose and sloppy uniform. Where the Lagerälteste’s eyes seemed focused on every detail in front of him, the Lagerkapo’s eyes were listless. I believed he held no pride for his position, doing only the minimum necessary to keep his privileges. That made him sympathetic in my eyes.
“Kommando one hundred and thirty-six. Forty-four Häftlinge, one dead!” Hans announced as we passed the guard station.
Roster in hand, the SS guard counted our lines. The last row was made up of the dead man who had collapsed while mixing cement and his four pallbearers. The dead had to be returned to the camp or we would have hell to pay. Being so consumed with preventing us from breaking out, I questioned why the Nazis didn’t hang the dead for escaping.
Like birds on a wire, fifty of us sat on the Block’s heating pipe with our bowls of soup and began to thaw out. The bell for assembly rang.
“Alles raus!” (Everybody out!) the Blockälteste shouted.
Armed with a stick, the Stubendienste hustled men toward the door. I hadn’t finished my soup. I took a quick swallow, then hid my bowl on a rafter above my bunk.
Thick clouds blanketed the moon on this damp night and searchlights lit up the Appelplatz where Blocks were already lined up in rows of five. The beam of a single searchlight enveloped three gibbets. Rumors of who was to hang circulated, but no one had any real idea. A group of SS guards with bayoneted rifles formed a semi-circle in front of the gibbets. Three Häftlinge were marched across the Appelplatz. This was my third hanging, but the first time witnessing a multiple execution.
It was about three weeks after my arrival that I witnessed my first hanging. I looked down at my torn shoes when the condemned Dutchman stepped up to the scaffold. As an SS officer rattled off some Nazi legal crap that frequently mentioned the Führer and the greater glory of Germany, I closed my eyes and considered what the Dutchman’s last thoughts were. The trapdoor’s dropping made my body jerk to attention, but I kept my eyes shut. As they marched us past the scaffold, I stared at the blue stripes of the fellow in front of me. It was only a few weeks later that I witnessed my second hanging. By then I was hardened enough by our daily misery that I didn’t bother to close my eyes.
The execution orders for these three men were ridiculously longwinded. Two of the condemned men were Poles who had been caught trying to escape. The third was a young Greek, not much older than I, who had stolen some bread during an air raid alert.
“Im Namen des Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler!” (In the name of Reich führer Heinrich Himmler!) The Lagerführer finished and shoved the orders into his SS coat pocket.
A group of green triangle Kapos laughed. For these career criminals the hangings were a Grand Guignol attraction, an entertaining diversion from their monotony. As if betting on racehorses, they put money and cigarettes on which of the three would live the longest.
Resigned to their fate, the two Poles stepped up to their nooses without uttering a word. The Greek fell to the ground with tears rolling down his face.