“See if you can repair this,” snapped my Kapo, Kristian Berg, a sea captain who was rumored to have killed four prostitutes in a Hamburg brothel.
I stopped tapping threads into Winidur, and he handed me a pressure gauge. My ingenuity had gotten me christened the “Doctor Fix-it” of our shop. This one was a cinch. The pressure gauge wasn’t working because its tiny right-angle gearbox was jammed. Once I warmed up the grease inside, the bevel gears engaged smoothly.
Holding that gearbox in my hand I thought, if I had this in Auschwitz I could have been co-owner of a successful Häftling dental practice. When I was in the pipe shop in Buna, a dentist from Salonika, Greece, mentioned that if he had even the most primitive tools he could treat Häftlinge with toothaches during our lunch breaks. His words stuck with me, and after the first bombing raid I salvaged a bicycle and the speedometer cable from a burned-out car. In the pipe shop’s supply room, I soldered a small drill bit to the speedometer cable, then attached the other end of the cable to the bike’s dynamo. When someone pedaled, the drill bit whirled at a good speed. The dentist was pleased with my contraption and we went into business.
With me on the bike, the Greek drilled out cavities, then filled them with plaster we had “organized” from one of the construction sites. Our rate was one bowl of soup, which we split. Because the dentist could drill only on a bias, the drill bit would always slip off the tooth. This caused unendurable pain for the patient and the screams scared off business. With one of those pressure-gauge gearboxes the dentist would have been able to drill straight into the tooth. However, even with the gearbox it still would have been a short-lived venture because two weeks later my contraption was blasted to bits along with the shop in the second air raid.
At dawn, after a sleepless night thanks to the bed bugs and the cramps in my stringy calves, I would walk around the camp looking in the moss for acorns that the squirrels had missed. A pocketful could last me the whole day. Many mornings the SS had no bread for us to eat because of the Allied bombings of their trains. They substituted boiled rotten potatoes, but those earth apples lasted only a few days. So there were many days I went to work with my stomach running on empty. One March morning I was hunting for acorns along the barbed-wire fence. The snow had melted and a light breeze shook the branches of the oak and pine trees. Somewhere above me a nightingale was singing. In the valley, the morning light reflecting on the roofs and medieval towers of the town of Nordhausen created a storybook illustration. Stopping at the barred front gate, I couldn’t help but think of the commencement speech that the principal of my high school had given two long years ago.
“Graduates, you are the elite of our youth and now all doors are open to you.”
Damn dirty liar.
The reveille bell sounded and the nightingale shot out of the pines. I hurried back to my Block, where I found a table piled high with loaves of bread. To my disbelief, each of us got a whole loaf, which normally would have been rationed for six. Later I learned that the shipment was intended for a camp that had already been liberated by the Americans. I went to work with a lighter heart, wolfishly devouring half of my bread on the way down the trail.
With a full belly I could see myself witnessing American tanks smashing through those gates and making my principal’s words come true.
When I reached my workbench, I put the other half of the loaf in a drawer. An hour later I couldn’t resist temptation. I cut the bread into thin slices with a coping saw and made my dream of eating toast come true by putting the slices on my electric soldering iron. When they brought the coffee, it was already cold. Why not heat it the same way, I thought? I took the iron and dipped it into the liquid. The sudden cooling cracked the filament. A sickening feeling sank into my gut. Since I was the one responsible for my tools, the boche could accuse me of sabotage. What was I going to do? I took the iron apart in hope of repairing it. My Kapo, Kristian, came up and watched over my shoulder.
“Wenn det heute Abend nicht geht, kriegste fünf und zwanzig, auf ’n Arsch.” (If that isn’t in working order by this evening, you’ll get twenty-five on your ass.)
He knew as well as I that it would be impossible to repair the iron. I couldn’t let a day that had begun so well turn completely sour. I came up with a scheme. The tool room clerk inspected our tools when we returned them, and he would immediately know that mine was broken, but he wouldn’t be able to if I returned it hot.
I went to the tool room with a metal chit that had my workbench number stamped on it, and got an identical Löteisen (soldering iron). Back at my workbench I used the good iron to heat up the broken one. A short while later, holding my breath, I turned in the broken soldering iron. Burning himself on it, the clerk swore and threw the chit at my head. I ducked and with a smile picked it off the floor.
Whenever I could I collected the discarded cigarette butts of the civilian plant workers for my own smoking pleasure. To ensure I didn’t burn my fingers trying to puff out the last slivers of tobacco, I made a sharp-looking cigarette holder from scrap electronic parts.
A German technician took a fancy to it and bought it for a pack of cigarettes that I in turn swapped for a few bowls of soup. Soon I had a thriving business, and I even gained weight from the extra soup.
One day I decided to make myself a good luck charm, a heart made out of Winidur. As I was working on it, a hand grabbed the heart and another my right ear. A Luftwaffe major, whom I had neglected to notice, led me toward the loft where Kristian had his desk. I didn’t dare stumble as the officer climbed the stairs two at a time or my ear would have been upstairs without me. Seeing the officer, Kristian jumped to attention with his cap at the seam of his trousers.
The major threw the heart on his desk. Kristian stared at my primitive jewelry while I bowed my head in feigned contrition. His powerful punch sent me flying across the deck, and I thought my head was going to snap off my neck. I played possum, bracing myself for a barrage of kicks, but both Germans were satisfied with the results of the right cross. The major left to continue his inspection and Kristian returned to his desk. “Back to work, you asshole!” he yelled.
Rubbing my jaw and split lip, I slowly picked myself up and slinked down the stairs. Later, Kristian came to my bench and looked over my shoulder. “How’s your jaw? Nothing broken?”
“You have a hell of a fist,” I said.
“That was for your stupidity. You’re lucky I held back. If it had been SS, I would’ve bruised my knuckles and sent you to your ancestors toothless.”
“Well, thanks.” I painfully smiled
“No more cigarette holders, you idiot.”
“You knew?”
“I got smokes and you got some. No civilian would dare talk to you without asking me first. By the way, whose initials are on the heart?”
“My mother’s.”
“Here, go hide your bad luck charm.”
Kristian returned to his desk. I squeezed the heart between my hands. Even the slightest act of kindness seemed like a hallucina-tion. For a green triangle, Kristian was more decent than I could have hoped for, and I had my high school German teacher to thank for it. Mr. Claudel, who hailed from Alsace, demanded that we write our assignments using an old German alphabet. Everyone in the class despised him for it. Not only were the letters of this alphabet extremely hard to replicate, but it was fast becoming obsolete.