Fatelessness

SEVEN

Cases may occur, situations present themselves, that no amount of ingenuity could possibly make worse, it would seem. I can report that, after so much striving, so many futile attempts and efforts, in time I too found peace, tranquillity, and relief. For instance, certain things to which I had previously attributed some vast, practically inconceivable significance, I can tell you, lost all importance in my eyes. Thus, if I grew tired while standing at Appell, for example, without so much as a look at whether it was muddy or there was a puddle, I would simply take a seat, plop down, and stay down, until my neighbors forcibly pulled me up. Cold, damp, wind, or rain were no longer able to bother me; they did not get through to me, I did not even sense them. Even my hunger passed; I continued to carry to my mouth anything edible I was able to lay my hands on, but more out of absentmindedness, mechanically, out of habit, so to say. As for work, I no longer even strove to give the appearance of it. If people did not like that, at most they would beat me, and even then they could not truly do much harm, since for me it just won some time: at the first blow I would promptly stretch out on the ground and would feel nothing after that, since I would meanwhile drop off to sleep.

Just one thing inside me grew stronger: my irritability. If anyone should encroach on my bodily comfort, even just touch my skin, or if I missed my step (as often happened) when the column was on the march, for example, and someone behind me trod on my heel, I would have been quite prepared instantly, without a moment’s hesitation, without further ado, to kill them on the spot — had I been able to, of course, and had I not forgotten, by the time I raised my hand, what it was I had in fact wanted to do. I even had rows with Bandi Citrom: I was “letting myself go,” I was a burden on the work squad, he would catch my scabies, he reproached me. But above all else, it was as if I somehow embarrassed or worried him in a certain respect. I became conscious of this one evening when he took me with him to the washroom. My flailing and protests were to no avail as he stripped me of my clothes with all the strength he could muster; my attempts to pummel his body and face with my fists to no avail as he scrubbed cold water over my shivering skin. I told him a hundred times over that his guardianship was a nuisance to me, he should leave me alone, just eff off. Did I want to croak right here, did I maybe not want to get back home, he asked, and I have no clue what answer he must have read from my face but, all at once, I saw some form of consternation or alarm written all over his, in much the same way as people generally view irremediable trouble-makers, condemned men or, let’s say, carriers of pestilence, which was when the opinion he had once expressed about Muslims crossed my mind. In any event, from then on, he tended to steer clear of me, I could see that, while I, for my part, was finally relieved of that particular bother.

There was no way I could shake off my knee, however, and an increasingly persistent pain in it. After a few days I inspected it, and for all my body’s accommodation to many things by now, I nevertheless thought it advisable to promptly shield myself from the sight of this new surprise, the flaming red sac into which the area around my right knee had been transformed. I was well aware, naturally, that a Revier[24]was functioning in our camp as well, but then, for starters, the consulting hour coincided with supper time, and in the end I placed higher priority on that than on any treatment, and then too various incidents, this and that bit of knowledge of the place itself and of life, did not exactly boost one’s confidence. For another, it was a long way off, two tents farther over, and unless forced by absolute necessity, I would not willingly have embarked on such a lengthy excursion, not least because my knee was by now extremely painful. Eventually, Bandi Citrom and one of our bunk-mates, forming a cradle with their hands, a bit like storks are said to carry their young to safety, took me over anyway, and after I had been set on a table I was given a warning, well in advance, that it was most likely going to hurt as immediate surgery was unavoidable, which for lack of any anesthetic would have to be done without that. As far as I could make out what was going on, a pair of crosswise incisions were made above the knee with a scalpel, and through that they expressed the mass of matter that was in my thigh, then bandaged the whole lot up with paper. Right afterward I even mentioned supper and was assured that this would be taken care of, as indeed I soon found to be the case. That day’s soup was turnip and kohlrabi, which I am very partial to, and the portions doled out for the Revier had palpably been taken from the bottom of the vat, which was another reason to be satisfied. I also spent the night there, in the Revier tent, in a box on the uppermost tier that I had all to myself, the only unpleasant aspect being that when the usual time for a bout of diarrhea came around, I was no longer able to use my own legs, while my efforts to call for help, first whispering, then out loud, and finally yelling, were likewise fruitless. On the morning of the following day, mine and a number of other bodies were hoisted up onto the soaking-wet sheet-iron flooring of an open truck to be transported to a nearby place that, if I heard rightly, goes by the name of “Gleina,” where our camp’s actual hospital is situated. En route a soldier seated on a neat folding stool, a damply glistening rifle on his knees, kept an eye on us in the back, his face visibly surly, grudging, and at times, presumably in response to an occasional sudden stench or sight he could not avoid, grimacing in disgust — not entirely without due cause, I had to admit. Particularly upsetting to me, it was as if in his mind he had come to some opinion, deduced some general truth, and I would have liked to excuse myself: I was not entirely the only one at fault here, and in fact this was not the genuine me — but then that would have been hard for me to prove, naturally, I could see that. Once we had arrived, first of all I had to endure a jet of water from a rubber pipe, a sort of garden hose, that was unexpectedly unleashed on me and probed after me whichever way I turned, washing everything off me: the remaining tatters of clothing, dirt, and even the paper bandage. But then they took me into a room where I was given a shirt and the lower of a two-tier bed of boards, and on that was even able to lie on a straw mattress that, although obviously tamped and pressed down fairly flat and hard by my predecessor, and mottled here and there with suspicious stains, suspicious-smelling and suspiciously crackling discolorations, was at least unoccupied and on which it was finally left entirely up to me how I spent my time and, most of all, to have a decent sleep at long last.

It looks as though we always carry old habits along with us even to new places; in the hospital, I can tell you, I had to struggle at first with what even I myself found to be many inveterate and ingrained reflexes. Conscientiousness, for instance: to start with, it invariably awakened me at dawn on the dot. At other times I would start awake thinking I had slept through Appell and outside they were already hunting me; only after my racing heart had calmed down would I notice my error and accept what lay before my own eyes, the evidence of reality, that I was where I was, everything was all right, over this way someone was groaning, somewhat farther away people were chatting, and over there someone else had his pointed nose, stony gaze, and gaping mouth trained mutely on the ceiling, that only my wound was hurting, and besides that at most, as at all times, I was very thirsty, presumably due to my fever, quite clearly. In short, I needed a bit of time until I had fully taken it in that there was no Appell, that I would not have to see soldiers, and, above all, did not have to go to work — advantages from which, for me at least, no inconsequential circumstance or illness, at bottom, could detract. From time to time, I too was taken up to a small room on the floor above, where the two doctors worked, a younger and an older one, with my being a patient of the latter, so to say. He was a lean, dark-haired, kindly looking man, in a clean uniform, with proper shoes, an armband, and a normal, recognizable face that put me in mind of an amiable, aging fox. He asked where I was from and recounted that he himself came from Transylvania. In the meantime he had stripped off the peeling and by now caked, greenish yellow wad of paper that had been rolled around the knee area, then, putting his weight behind both arms, squeezed from my thigh all the pus that had accumulated there in the interim, and finally, with some instrument resembling a crochet hook, poked a rolled-up length of gauze between skin and flesh — for purposes of “maintaining an open passage” and “the drainage process,” as he explained, lest the wound heal prematurely. For my part, I was happy to hear this as, when you came right down to it, I had nothing to do on the outside; if I really thought things through, of course, my health was hardly of such pressing concern to me. Another comment he made, though, was less to my liking. He reckoned the single perforation on my knee was not sufficient; in his opinion, a second opening ought to be made on the side and connected with the first by yet a third incision. He asked if I was prepared to brace myself for that, and I was utterly amazed that he was looking at me as if he were actually awaiting an answer, my consent, not to mention authorization. I told him, “Whatever you wish,” and he immediately said that in that case it would be best not to delay. He duly set to on the spot, but then I found myself obliged to act a little bit vocally, which, I could see, got on his nerves. He even commented several times: “I can’t work like this,” for which I tried to make excuses: “I can’t help it.” After making an inch or so of headway, he finally abandoned the attempt, without fully completing what he had planned to do; even so, he seemed tolerably well pleased, noting, “It’s better than nothing,” since now, he reckoned, he would at least be able to expel the pus from me at two sites. Time also went by in the hospital; if I happened not to be sleeping, then I would always be kept busy by hunger, thirst, the pain around the wound, the odd conversation, or the event of a treatment; but even without anything to occupy me, I can say that I got along splendidly merely by bearing this pleasantly tingling thought in mind, this privilege and the unbounded joy it always afforded. I would interrogate each new arrival for news from the camp: which block they were from, did they by any chance know of a guy called Bandi Citrom from Block Fünf, medium height, broken nose, front teeth missing, but no one could recall such a person. Most of the injuries I saw in the surgery room were similar to mine, likewise mainly on the thigh or lower leg, though some were higher up, on the hip, the backside, arm, even the neck and back, being what are known scientifically as “phlegmons,” a term I heard a lot, the presence and particularly high incidence of which was neither odd nor amazing under normal concentration camp conditions, as I learned from the doctors. A little later on, there started to arrive cases who had to have a toe or two amputated, sometimes all of them, and they recounted that it was winter out there in the camp, so their feet, being in wooden shoes, had frozen. On another occasion, some manifestly high-ranking personage, in a tailored prison uniform, entered the bandaging station. I distinctly heard a quiet “Bonjour!” from which, along with the letter “F” on his red triangle, I immediately worked out he was French, then from the “O. Arzt” inscribed on his armband that he was clearly the chief medical officer in our hospital. I stared at him for a long time, because it was ages since I had seen anyone so elegant: he was not particularly tall, but his uniform was nicely filled out by appropriate bulges of flesh on the bones, his face similarly padded, every feature unmistakably his own, with expressible emotions, recognizable nuances, a rounded chin with a dimple in the middle, his olive skin gleaming softly in the light that fell on it, the way skin had generally done once, in the old days, among people back home. I assessed him as being not very old, maybe around thirty. I saw that the doctors too perked up a lot, striving to please him, explaining everything, but noticed this was not so much in the way that was customary within the camp as somehow in accordance with the old and, as it were, instantly nostalgic custom back home, with the sort of discrimination, delight, and social graces that one displays when given an opportunity to display how capitally one understands and speaks some cultured language like, as in this instance, French. On the other hand, though, I could not help noting that this cannot have signified much to the chief doctor, for he looked at everything, gave an occasional monosyllabic answer, or just nodded, but taking his time, quietly, gloomily, listlessly, with an immutable expression of some despondent, all but melancholic emotion in his hazel eyes from first to last. I was dumbfounded as I could not work out what might give rise to that in such a well-off, well-heeled Prominent, who had moreover risen to such a high rank. I tried to search his face, follow his gestures, and it only gradually dawned on me that, make no mistake, when it came down to it, even he was obliged to be here, of course; only gradually, and this time not entirely without an element of astonishment, a sort of serene awe, did the impression grow on me, and I reckoned I was on to something, that if I was right, then it must, it seemed, be this situation — in a word, captivity itself — that was troubling him. I would have told him to cheer up, since that was the least of it, but I was afraid that would be temerity on my part, and then it occurred to me that I didn’t speak French anyway.

I slept through the transfer too, more or less. Prior to that, the news had reached me that in the meantime winter quarters, stone-walled barracks, had been constructed in place of the tents at Zeitz, and among those provision for a hospital had not been overlooked. Again I was tossed onto a truck — judging from the darkness, it must have been evening, and from the cold, sometime around midwinter— and the next thing I made out was a cold, well-illuminated anteroom to some immeasurably vast place, and in the anteroom a wooden tub smelling of chemicals. I was obliged to wash — all complaints, pleading, and protest being to absolutely no effect — to dip myself in it to the crown of my head, which, apart from the coldness of its contents, made me shudder even more since I could not help but notice that all the other sick people — wounds and all — had already immersed in that selfsame brown liquid before me. After which, here too time started to elapse, and in essentially the same manner as at the previous place, with only minor differences. In our new hospital, for instance, there were triple-decker bunks; we were also taken off to the doctor less frequently, and so it was more here that my wound cleared up, in its own way, as best it could. On top of that, not long afterward a pain started on my left hip followed by the now familiar flaming red sac. A few days after that, having waited in vain for it to subside, or maybe for something else to intervene, I was driven, like it or not, to mention it to the orderly, then after renewed urging, some further days of waiting, I finally took my place in the queue for the doctors in the anteroom to the barracks, as a result of which, to go with the incision on my right knee, another, roughly the length of my palm, was made on my left hip. More unpleasantness arose from where I was placed, on one of the lower bunks, since it happened to be directly opposite a tiny, unglazed window that was open to the invariably gray sky and on the iron bars of which the clouds of steaming exhalations in here had probably been responsible for forming permanent icicles with a perpetual coating of furry hoarfrost. All I had to wear, however, was what was issued to patients: a short, buttonless shirt and, with some regard to the winter season, the gift of a peculiar, green-colored woolly cap with circular flaps over the ears and a wedge-shaped protrusion over the brow that, although somewhat resembling the headgear of a speed-skating champion or an actor doing Satan on stage, was nonetheless extremely useful. As a result, I was often freezing, especially after losing one of my two blankets, the tatters of which had, up till then, allowed me to make up quite tolerably for the shortcomings of the other: I should lend it for a short period, so said the orderly, he would bring it back later. Even using both hands, my attempts to hold fast to it were in vain, he proving the stronger; but what rather upset me, besides the loss itself, was the thought that, as best I knew, they generally had a habit of stripping the blankets most frequently off those for whom the end seemed predictable, not to say anticipated. On yet another occasion, a voice that had meantime grown familiar to me, from another lower bunk somewhere behind me, alerted me to the fact that an orderly must have made another appearance, once again with a new patient in his arms, and was in the middle of casting around to see which of our beds he might be deposited on. The gravity of the voice’s case, we learned, and the doctor’s approval entitled him to a bed of his own, and he roared and thundered “I protest!” invoked “I have a right to it! Just ask the doctor!” and again “I protest!” so stridently that the orderlies would indeed, eventually, keep carrying their load on to another bed — my own, for example; which is how I acquired another boy who looked to be roughly my own age as a bunk-mate. The sallow face and large, burning eyes seemed vaguely familiar to me, but then, equally, everyone here had a sallow face and large, burning eyes. His first words were to ask if I happened to have a glass of water, so I told him I wouldn’t mind one myself, and that was followed immediately by: what about a cigarette? and of course he was no luckier on that score either. He offered bread for one, but I made it clear he should drop it, that had nothing to do with it, I simply didn’t have any, at which he fell silent for a while. I suspect he must have had a fever as heat was pouring steadily from his persistently shivering body, from which I was able to take agreeable profit. I was less enchanted with all his tossing and turning during the night, which, to be sure, did not always pay adequate consideration to my wounds. I told him as well: Hey! Cut it out, ease up there, and in the end he heeded the advice. I only saw why the next morning, when my repeated attempts to rouse him for coffee were futile. All the same, I hastily passed his mess tin to the orderly along with my own since, just as I was about to report the case, he snappily asked me for it. I later also accepted his bread ration on his behalf, and likewise his soup that evening, and so on for a while, until one day he began to go really strange, which was when I felt obliged finally to say something, as I could not carry on stowing him in my bed, after all. I was somewhat apprehensive as the delay was by now rather obvious, though its reason— with a mite of acumen, on which I could still draw — seemed easy enough to deduce, but anyway he was taken away with the others and nothing was said, thank goodness, so for the time being I too was left without a companion.

One further thing that I truly made acquaintance of here was the vermin. I was quite unable to catch the fleas: they were nimbler than me, and for a very good reason too, after all, they were better nourished. Catching the lice was easy, only it made no sense. If I grew particularly exasperated with them, all I had to do was run a thumbnail at random over the canvas of the shirt stretched on my back to mete revenge, wreak devastation, in a series of clearly audible pops; yet within a minute I could have repeated it all over again, on the selfsame spot, with exactly the same result. They were everywhere, wriggling into every hidden crevice; my green cap was so infested as to turn gray and all but crawl with them. Still, the biggest surprise of all was the consternation, then horror, of feeling a sudden tickling sensation on my hip and then, on lifting the paper bandage, seeing they were now on my open flesh there, feeding on the wound. I tried to snatch them away, get rid of them, at least root and winkle them out, compel them to wait and be patient at least a little bit longer, but I have to admit that never before had I sensed a more hopeless struggle or a more stubborn, even, so to say, more brazen resistance than this. After a while, indeed, I gave up and just watched the gluttony, the teeming, the voracity, the appetite, the unconcealed happiness; in a manner of speaking, it was as though it were vaguely familiar to me from somewhere. Even so, I realized that, to some extent, and taking everything into account, I could see it their way. In the end, I almost felt relieved, even my sense of revulsion very nearly passed. I was still not pleased, still remained a little bit bitter about it, understandably enough I think, but now it was somehow more generalized, without acrimony, in acquiesing to a degree in nature’s larger scheme, if I may put it that way; in any event, I quickly covered the wound up and subsequently no longer engaged in combat with them, no longer disturbed them.

I can affirm that there is no amount of experience, no tranquillity so perfect, nor any insight of such weight, it seems, as to lead us to abandon yet one more last chance in our favor — assuming there is a way, naturally. Thus, when I, along with all the others on whom it was clear not too much further hope can have been pinned of being set to work again here, in Zeitz, was returned to sender as it were — back to Buchenwald — I naturally shared the others’ joy with every faculty that was left me, since I was promptly reminded of the good times there, most especially the morning soups. However, I gave no thought, I have to admit, to the fact that I would first have to get there, by rail at that, and under the conditions of travel that now implied; in any event, I can tell you there were things that I had never previously understood, indeed would have had trouble in crediting at all. A once so commonly heard expression as “his earthly remains,” for instance, as far as I knew up till then, was applicable solely to someone deceased. For my own part, I could hardly have doubted it, I was alive: even if only guttering and, as it were, turned down to the very lowest mark, a flicker of life nevertheless still burned within me as they say, or to put it another way, my body was here, I had precise cognizance of everything about it, it was just that I myself somehow no longer inhabited it. I had no difficulty in perceiving that this entity, and other similar entities to its side and above it, was lying there, on the wagon’s jolting flooring, on cold straw so dampened by all sorts of dubious fluids that my paper bandage had long since frayed, peeled, and become detached, while the shirt and prison trousers in which I had been dressed for the journey were pasted to my naked wounds— yet all this was of no immediate concern to me, of no interest, no longer had any impact, indeed I would maintain that it had been a long time since I had felt so easy, tranquil, almost lost in reverie — so comfortable, to be quite frank. For the first time in ages, I was freed of the torments of irritability: the bodies squeezed up against mine no longer bothered me, indeed I was somehow even glad that they were there with me, that they were so akin and so similar to mine, and it was now that an unwonted, anomalous, shy, I might even say clumsy feeling toward them came over me for the first time — I believe it may, perhaps, have been affection. I encountered the same on their part as well. True, they no longer held out much in the way of hope, as they once had. It could be that this — above and beyond all other difficulties, naturally — is what gave rise to other manifestations that could sometimes be heard alongside the general groaning, the hisses from between clenched teeth, the quiet plaints — a word of solace and reassurance — so hushed and yet, at the same time, so intimate. But I can say that those who still had any capacity at all were not remiss in actions either, and when I announced that I needed to urinate diligent hands were merciful to me too by passing on the brass can from who knows how far away. By the time ice-skimmed puddles on paved ground, instead of those on the train’s floorboards, finally came to be under my back — how, when, and by dint of the hands of which person or persons, I have no idea — I can tell you it no longer meant all that much to me that I had arrived safely back at Buchenwald, and I had also long forgotten that this was the place, when all is said and done, that I had yearned so much to reach. I did not even have an inkling where I might be, whether still at the railway station or farther inside; I did not recognize the surroundings, nor did I see the road, the villas, and statue that I still clearly remembered.

In any case, it seemed I must have lain there in that way for some time, and I was getting on just fine, peacefully, placidly, incuriously, patiently, where they had set me down. I felt no cold or pain, and it was more my intellect than my skin which signaled that some stinging precipitation, half snow, half rain, was spattering my face. I mused on one thing and another, gazed at whatever happened to strike my eye without any superfluous movement or effort: the low, gray, impenetrable sky, for instance, or to be more precise the leaden, sluggishly moving wintry cloud-cover, which concealed it from view. Nevertheless, every now and again it would be parted by an unexpected rent, with a more brilliant gap arising in it here and there for a fleeting moment, and that was like a sudden intimation of a depth out of which a ray was seemingly being cast on me from up above, a rapid, searching gaze, an eye of indeterminate but unquestionably pale hue — somewhat similar to that of the doctor before whom I had once passed, back in Auschwitz. A shapeless object right next to me: a wooden shoe and on the other side a devil’s cap similar to mine with, between two jutting appurtenances — a nose and chin — a hollow indentation: a face came into my field of vision. Beyond that were further heads, entities, bodies — what I understood to be the remnants or, if I may use the more precise term, debris of the freight consignment that had presumably been parked here for the time being. Some time later, and I don’t know if it was an hour, a day, or a year, I finally picked out voices, noises, the sounds of work, and tidying up. All of a sudden, the head next to me rose, and lower down, by the shoulders, I saw arms in prison garb preparing to toss it onto the top of a heap of other bodies that had already been piled on some kind of handcart or barrow. At the same time, a snatch of speech that I was barely able to make out came to my attention, and in that hoarse whispering I recognized even less readily a voice that had once — I could not help recollecting — been so strident: “I p… pro… test,” it muttered. For a moment, before swinging onward, he came to a halt in midair, in astonishment as it were, or so I thought, and I immediately heard another voice — obviously that of the person grasping him by the shoulders. It was a pleasant, masculine-sounding, friendly voice, slightly foreign, the Lager vernacular of the German attesting, so I sensed, more to a degree of surprise, a certain amazement, than any malice: “Was? Du willst noch leben?”[25]he asked, and right then I too found it odd, since it could not be warranted and, on the whole, was fairly irrational. I resolved then that I, for my part, was going to be more sensible. By then, however, they were already leaning over me, and I was forced to blink because a hand was fumbling near my eyes before I too was dumped into the middle of a load on a smaller handcart, which they then started to push somewhere, though as to where, I wasn’t too inquisitive. Only one thing preoccupied me, one thought, one question that passed through my mind at this moment. It may well have been my fault for not knowing, but I had never had the foresight to inquire about the customs, rules, and procedures at Buchenwald — in short, how they did it here: was it with gas, as at Auschwitz, or maybe by means of some medicine, which I had also heard about, or possibly a bullet or some other way, with one of a thousand other methods of which, having insufficient information, I was ignorant. At all events, I hoped it was not going to be painful; strange as it may seem, this too was just as genuine, and preoccupied me in just the same way, as other, more valid hopes that — in a manner of speaking — one pins on the future. Only then did I find out that vanity is an emotion that, it seems, attends a person right up to their very last moment, because truly, however much this uncertainty may have been nagging me, I did not address any question or request so much as a single word, nor even cast a fleeting glance behind me, to the person or persons who were pushing. The path, however, came to a high bend, and down below a broad panorama suddenly emerged beneath me. The dense landscape that populated the entire vast downward slope stood there, with its identical stone houses, the neat green barracks, and then, forming a separate group, a cluster of perhaps new, somewhat grimmer, as yet unpainted barracks, with the serpentine, yet visibly orderly tangle of inner barbed-wire fences separating the various zones, and farther off a trackless expanse of huge, now bare trees disappearing into the mist. I did not know what a crowd of naked Muslims were waiting for by a building over there, but I did indeed suddenly identify a few worthies who, judging by their stools and busy movements as they sauntered back and forth, were barbers, if I was not mistaken, which meant it must obviously be the day’s intake for the bathhouse. Farther in, as well, the distant, cobblestoned streets of the Lager were also inhabited by signs of movement, languid activity, pottering about, killing time: founder inmates, the ailing, prominent personages, storemen, and the fortunate elect of the in-camp work Kommandos were coming and going, carrying out their everyday duties. Here and there, more suspect plumes of smoke mingled with more benign vapors, while a familiar-sounding clatter drifted up faintly my way from somewhere, like bells in dreams, and as I gazed down across the scene, I caught sight of a procession of bearers, poles on shoulders, groaning under the weight of steaming cauldrons, and from far off I recognized, there could be no doubting it, a whiff of turnip soup in the acrid air. A pity, because it must have been that spectacle, that aroma, which cut through my numbness to trigger an emotion, the growing waves of which were able to squeeze, even from my dried-out eyes, a few warmer drops amid the dank-ness that was soaking my face. Despite all deliberation, sense, insight, and sober reason, I could not fail to recognize within myself the furtive and yet — ashamed as it might be, so to say, of its irrationality — increasingly insistent voice of some muffled craving of sorts: I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.