Forty-four thousand? I knew of the existence of the brown triangle Gypsies, but I had never crossed paths with a single one.
That day I was acutely aware of every SS guard I passed at the plant. They had been so secretive about their slaughters for so long, and now they were brazenly bragging. Was mass murder that easy? I guess if you can kill one in cold blood, what’s another four or a thousand or forty thousand?
I had become numb to their savagery, and I hated them for doing that to me. I knew I would remember the girl from the Puff, maybe Mario and Pressburger, but my other fellow Muselmänner were just faceless cattle in the slaughterhouse.
Rumors circulated for a week about what had happened that night. One was that the Gypsies had been exterminated to make room for skilled Häftlinge from the camps near the Eastern Front.
True or not, it was sobering reminder that there was nothing preventing the SS from processing all of us the same way once they had no use for us. Another was that the crematoriums had broken down that night, and after the Gypsies had been gassed their bodies were torched in open pits along with many arriving Jews.[7]
The “prominent” Häftlinge arriving from the abandoned Eastern Front camps found themselves stripped of their status and privileges. For some this was as good as being sent to the gas chambers.
One morning before roll call I noticed fifteen “pajamas” standing in a circle, yelling obscenities. In the center was a bloodied Häftling screaming for help. He was being pushed and punched from all sides. Grinning and laughing, the guards watched from the fence. I was sure they were taking bets. The man finally collapsed to the ground, and the infuriated “pajamas” kicked him until he was just a bloody mess of broken bones. He was dead or in a coma. Either way, the Transportation Kommando would make sure he was on the back of their truck. Out of curiosity, I asked a yellow triangle standing at the circle’s perimeter why they had done him in. He told me the man had been a Jewish policeman in one of the ghettos.
“He was the worst of the bunch. A son of a bitch.”
Well, if that many guys have decided that he had it coming, he must have deserved it, I thought as I lined up in my Kommando.
CHAPTER 14
After so many false alarms, our first Allied bombardment finally came on an idle August Sunday when we stayed in the camp. I thought that the distant explosions in the plant were butane tanks erupting. Forty English POWs were killed in that raid and a woman’s camp was laid in ruins. An untold number of female Häftlinge had perished, and I couldn’t stop wondering if Stella was among them.
I was cleaning out a new methanol tank that we had just buried and connected to our pipes when the air raid sirens started shrieking once again. As I climbed out of the tank, an Aussie came running over, dragging a pretty young woman dressed in factory coveralls.
“Speak English?”
“Enough.”
He handed me a half pack of cigarettes. “Mate, have some fags and keep an eye open. I need some privacy.”
The girl nervously fidgeted with her blond locks as she scanned the clouds for any indication of American bombers. Grayish puffs of exploding anti-aircraft shells were dotting the sky.
“My name is Pierre,” I told the Aussie.
“A hell of a time for introductions, mate,” he said as he herded the girl into the tank.
I sat down to enjoy one of the “fags” when I realized I needed matches. From the sounds inside the tank, it would have been rude to ask the POW for a light. Bombs began to explode in the distance as I calculated how many cigarettes I could smoke and still have enough for an extra ladle of soup. It wasn’t that I was blaseábout the bombing raid, it just wasn’t the first time I was on the receiving end of an aerial attack.
My baptism under fire was on a sunny day in June 1940. When the German army occupied Paris and the senile Marshal Philippe Pétain was ready to sign an armistice, Mussolini, the bold vulture of Rome, wanted to share in the spoils. Proclaiming “Niza nostra” (Nice is ours), he declared war. The French and Italian armies watched one another from their mountaintop fortresses, pondering who would fire the first shot while I went fishing for eels to supplement my family’s meager rations.
I pedaled my bike to the Brague River, which is on the way to Cannes, armed with a darning needle, a nine-foot-long bamboo pole, nightcrawlers, and an umbrella. With the darning needle I strung the bait on three-feet of fishing line, then wrapped it into a ball with another three-feet of thread. When the eels went for the juicy worms they would snag their crooked teeth on the thread.
They were hungry that day, and my upturned umbrella was almost filled with the slithering, slimy fish when I noticed an Italian Ca-proni bomber leisurely circling above me. A French Morane fighter burst out of the clouds with machine guns blazing. I watched with awe and fascination until the fighter’s stray bullets whizzed by me, churning up the water. I dropped my pole and hugged a tree, which was raked by rounds. When the planes disappeared behind a hill, I went to retrieve my pole, only to find it shattered. Just as well, I figured, since I was shaking too badly to hold it anyhow.
So, when I saw a squadron of B-17s in a V-formation closing in on the plant from the northwest, I knew hugging a tree wouldn’t do me any good. With the explosion of bombs closing in on me, I slid down the tank’s ladder. The Aussie was in full action and took no notice of me, but the woman, with her coveralls at her knees, was horrified and tried to hide her face. The tank began to quake from the bombs’ shock waves.
“Baby, don’t worry, it’s only friendly fire. I’ve got you covered.
I’m on top,” he joked.
The girl’s unease seemed evenly divided between my intrusion and the nearness of the bombs. How could he keep his erection through all this? I asked myself. I like tearing off a piece more than most, at least that was what my eighteen-year-old mind thought, but there was no way I could stand at attention during such a deadly hail. The Aussie had to have been a veteran of the siege of Torbruk.
While in school, I had read about the vicious, month-long beating Rommel gave the British in Libya. Hell, he didn’t even stop when a near miss shoveled mud through the tank’s hatch. No bomb was going to prevent him from getting his candy bar’s worth.
As soon as the raid was over, I gave them back their privacy and went looking for something on fire so I could enjoy one of my cigarettes. Unfortunately, the sight of the rubble of Herr Kies’s workshop ruined the taste of that tobacco. It was back to digging trenches under the sun.
They assigned me to a Kommando working close to the cement kiln where Hubert had worked before his stint in the HKB. The kiln had a towering smokestack the likes of which I had never seen before, easily over 300 feet high. All winter most of the smokestack had been hidden by fog. Now it glistened and shone red. It was constructed of concrete castings and the seams of the individual blocks made it look like a patchwork quilt.
“Do you see the second segment from the top?” a Polish yellow triangle asked as we were shoveling dirt out of a trench.
I nodded yes. The reek of kerosene told me that the Pole was spending his nights in the Krätzeblock.
“There’s a man’s body inside it. While we were pouring the cement, he slipped and fell into the mold. He pleaded for us to lower a nearby ladder, but the SS wouldn’t let us. Fresh cement was beginning to pile up. I’ll never forget his screams and terrified face as that mold filled.”
7
On August 2, 1944, 2,897 Roma (Gypsy) men, women, and children were taken from their camp in Birkenau and gassed. Their bodies were incinerated in pits because the crematoriums weren’t functioning at the time.