“Nichts klepsi, klepsi!” (No stealing, no stealing!) I looked over at my cabbage-stealing cohorts. Their blank stares told me that we all had the same thought—it could easily have been our necks. Two green triangles had to carry the Greek up to his gibbet. The Lagerkapo put the noose around his neck. The boy’s legs buckled, tightening the noose. There doesn’t seem to be much reason to drop the trapdoor now, I thought.
The trapdoors were sprung, the bodies fell, and the ropes went taut. The three men swung in slow circles. The Poles’ bound hands convulsively opened and closed as their shoulders jerked and their legs kicked furiously in the air. One of them lost his trousers. His white, sweaty legs and buttocks glistened in the searchlight’s beam.
The Greek hung lifeless like an empty sack. The Kapos who had bet on him spat curses.
“The dirty dog cheated us.”
“Tickle him to make him move.”
Other Kapos chimed in.
“Give the Poles some gum so they can chew on something more than their tongues.”
“Look how that one runs along.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t escape altogether.”
When the only things moving were the ropes, the Lagerkapo yanked on each man’s legs, and we heard the last cracking of their tendons. It was then that I realized that there was more than one way to die from hanging. The two Poles were pale and their tongues weren’t protruding from their half-open mouths. The drop had broken their necks and their thrashing about had been only reflex spasms. The young Greek had turned purple and his tongue jutted from his swollen face. This was my first death by strangulation.
“It’s perfectly justifiable to hang a thief,” said a Kapo.
The others chortled in agreement. Assholes, I cursed to myself.
How can these bona fide criminals sit in judgment of one whose only offense was being hungry? If the Greek lost his life because of a few crumbs of bread, how many times had they deserved to die?
“Links, zwei, drei, vier!” We filed past the gibbets.
At my second hanging, the Kapo in charge of the gallows pulled me out of line as we marched past. “Komm mit mir” (Come with me), he ordered.
I was in a panic. What did he want with me? Was he going to practice with my neck? I relaxed when I saw that he had already cut the rope. The stocky green triangle opened a small door at the base of the gibbet.
“Get him out.”
Inside lay the crumpled body of a young red triangle Pole whose failed escape had earned him the rope. He had stood erect on that platform and died without a whimper. I pulled him through the small opening by his legs. His coat slid over his head, straightening his arms in a gesture of surrender. I took the noose off his broken neck, curled the rope on his chest, and waited for the Kapo to return with a flat dolly. Staring at the Pole’s face, I decided that a broken neck was far easier than facing a trip to Birkenau.
When the Kapo arrived with the dolly, he pointed at the corpse.
“Switch shoes. They’re better than yours.”
I had noticed them, too, but didn’t dare take them on my own.
They were still warm.
“Abtreten! (Fall out!)” the Blockälteste commanded, and we all rushed toward the Block’s door as the bodies of our three comrades gently swung in the cold wind. I elbowed my way to the front of the herd. I had to get to my soup before someone else did. Minutes later, ribs bruised and out of breath, I sat on my bed and greedily wiped out the last cold drops with my fingers. In Nice, seeing a dog run over would have taken away my appetite for a whole day, but here the sight of those three men had hardly moved me. I was still relatively new to the camp, but many of my civilized attitudes and emotional endowments were muted or gone.
I couldn’t condone the Kapos, but I was beginning to understand why they were so cold-blooded and cruel. Auschwitz was a world where brutality and inhumanity were rewarded with privilege and preferential treatment, and compassion and empathy only hastened death. The SS sure knew what they were doing when they assigned convicts—hardened criminals—to run things. The cold truth was that the Kapos, like the rest of us in the camp, were just doing whatever they had to do to survive. The only difference was that some of those bastards truly enjoyed doing it.
CHAPTER 8
New arrivals assigned to our Block forced us to double up in the bunks. My sleeping companion was Olaf, a twenty-one-year-old college student and soldier from Oslo, Norway. We quickly became friends. I was ecstatic to be able to converse in German with someone well educated. When the lights were turned off we carried on long conversations in low voices. He had been taken prisoner in the first days of the blitzkrieg on Norway. Whole battalions had been surprised and encircled, and the German paratroopers left few survivors. I asked him why he had been sent to Monowitz since he was a POW.
“After my second escape attempt from the Stalag (POW camp) they shipped me here,” he answered with a smile.
Our principal topic of conversation, of course, was the war.
“We wouldn’t be sitting here if the French army had gone after the Nazis when they marched into the Rhineland,” I proclaimed.
“They had a chance to stop Hitler cold, but they fell for his bullshit.”
“Every prime minister, president, and monarch in Europe was a gullible idiot. ‘Peace in our time,’” Olaf spit sarcastically.
“And how can you fight when you have traitors stabbing you in the back at every step? It makes me sick to think how many good Frenchmen are rotting in here because of those Vichy bastards.”
“Yes, you have Laval[3] in bed with the Nazis and we have that bastard Quisling.[4] The best day of my life will be when I see him hanging from a flag pole.”
Ultimately, our empty stomachs steered our discussions to food.
“How can you French eat frogs and those slimy snails?” Olaf asked with a disgusted face.
“Snails are delicious. You just need to know how to prepare them. Someday soon I’ll be serving you escargot fattened on grape leaves.”
“You eat them raw?”
“Oh, no. You have to fry them first with some garlic and parsley butter. Oysters we slurp raw.”
“Well, we finally have something in common.” Olaf’s eyes lit up. “You know, when a girl likes oysters, it’s a good indicator that it’ll be a successful date.”
I muffled a laugh.
“That’s been my experience, too.”
Returning from his work detail one night, Olaf seemed changed. He was cheerful like a lottery winner. There was a gleam in his eyes as if the future no longer worried him, which was abnormal for any Häftling. Despite my curiosity, I didn’t ask the reason for the sudden shift in his demeanor and Olaf didn’t volunteer an explanation. In the nights that followed I realized that his bony frame was poking me less and less as we tried to sleep, and many times he would say his belly was full and give me his leftover soup.
One evening, as Olaf poured his soup into my bowl, I asked whether he wasn’t depriving himself with his generosity. I leaned in close, figuring that at last he would reveal his culinary benefactor.
Olaf raised his eyebrows in overstated surprise. “Are we not allies?”
3
Once the Nazis occupied France in 1940, Pierre Laval used his media empire of newspapers and radio stations to support Philippe Pétain and the Vichy government. For his effort, Laval became the head of the French government. He enabled the Gestapo to hunt down members of the French Resistance in unoccupied France (southern France). He also created the Vichy Milice, a paramilitary force, which in conjunction with the French police rounded up many French Jews and left-wing activists and had them shipped to concentration camps.
4
Vidkun Quisling was the leader of Norway’s Nasjonal Samling (National Socialist) Party, which the Nazis declared the only legal party after their invasion in 1940. In 1942, Quisling was installed as prime minister.