Fatelessness

FIVE

There can be no prisoner, I suppose, who would not be astounded, just a little, to start with in this situation. So, in the yard which we finally reached after the bath, the boys and I for a long time at first just examined and stared in wonderment at one another, turning each other around. But I also noticed a young-looking man nearby who at length and with absorbed attention, yet somehow hesitantly, was inspecting and patting his clothes from top to toe, as though he wished merely to convince himself about the quality of the material, its genuineness, so to say. After that, he glanced up, like someone who suddenly has a remark to make, but then, seeing all at once only clothes of the same kind around him, finally says nothing after all — that was my impression, right then at least, though that might have been mistaken, of course. Bald though he was, and in a convict outfit that was a little bit short on his tall frame, I still recognized him from his bony features as the lover who, approximately an hour before — because that was how much time must have passed from our arrival right up to our metamorphosis — had found it so hard to let go of the black-haired girl. One thing, however, bothered me quite a lot here. Back at home, I had once taken down at random from the bookshelf, as I recall, one of the more tucked-away volumes that was gathering dust there, unread since God knows when. The author had been a prisoner, and I didn’t read it right to the end either, because I wasn’t really able to follow his thinking, and then the characters all had dreadfully long names, in most cases three of them, all totally unmemorable, and in the end also because I was not the least bit interested in, indeed to be frank was somewhat repelled by, the prisoners’ life; consequently, I was left ignorant in my hour of need. The only bit that had stuck in my mind out of the whole thing was that the prisoner, the book’s author, claimed to recollect the early days of his imprisonment — that is to say, the ones most distant from him — better than he did the following years, which were, after all, closer to him when he was writing. At the time, I had found that rather hard to credit, even in some ways a bit of an exaggeration. Yet I now think he could well have written the truth after all, for I too recall the first day most precisely, and more precisely indeed, when I think about it, than I do the days that followed.

At the very beginning, I still considered myself to be what I might call a sort of guest in captivity — very pardonably and, when it comes down to it, in full accordance with the propensity to delusion that we all share and which is thus, I suppose, ultimately part of human nature. The courtyard, the sun-beaten area we had here, seemed rather barren, with no trace of a football pitch, seedbed, turf, or flowers to be found anywhere. The only thing standing there was an undecorated wooden building, outwardly resembling a large barn: manifestly our home. Entry, so I learned, was only permitted to us when the time came to turn in for the night. In front of and behind it, as far as the eye could see, was a long row of similar barns, and over to the left as well there was an absolutely identical row, at regular distances and intervals in front, behind, and to the side. Beyond that was that broad, dazzling, metaled road — or another metaled road like it, that is to say, since on that vast, completely flat terrain it had no longer really been possible, at least in my eyes, to keep track of the paths, squares, and identical buildings on our way from the bathhouse. Free passage along the radial road at the point it would have intersected with the crossroad between the barns was blocked by a very neat, fragile, toylike red and white pole barrier. On the right was one of those now familiar barbed-wire fences — electrically charged as I learned to my surprise, and indeed it was only then that I spotted the many white porcelain knobs on the concrete posts, just like those on power lines and telegraph posts at home. Its shock, I was assured, was lethal; apart from that, one only needed to step on the loose sand of the narrow path running along the foot of the fence for them to shoot one down, without a sound or word of warning, from the watchtower (this was pointed out and I duly recognized it as being what, at the station, I had taken to be a hunters’ hideout). In a short while, the corvée of volunteers arrived, amid a great clatter, staggering under the burden of brick red cauldrons. Before that, you see, a rumor had gone around, which was immediately discussed, commented on, and spread up and down the entire yard: “We’ll soon be getting some hot soup!” Needless to say, I reckoned it was high time too, but all the same, the sight of all those beaming faces, the gratitude, the singular, somehow almost childish delight with which this news was received slightly amazed me, and maybe that was why I had the feeling it might well have been chiefly directed not so much toward the soup but rather, in some way, toward the solicitude itself, coming at last after the sundry initial surprises, as it were — that, at least, was my feeling. I also considered it very likely that the information might well have derived from that prisoner who had immediately appeared to become our guide, not to say host, at this place. He too, just like the prisoner at the bathhouse, had a snugly fitting outfit, a head of hair, which to me in itself already seemed truly unusual, and on his head a soft cap of dark blue felt, what one would call a beret, on his feet elegant tan shoes, and on his arm a red band to give his authority immediately visible expression, and I began to realize that it seemed I ought to revise a notion I had been taught back home to the effect that “clothes do not make the man.” He likewise had a red triangle on his chest, and that too showed everyone straightaway that he was not here on account of his bloodline but merely for his way of thinking, as I was able to learn not much later. Though perhaps a trifle formal and laconic, he was amiable enough toward us, readily explaining all that was necessary, which I didn’t find at all odd at the time, since he had been here longer, after all, so I thought to myself. He was a tall man, on the thin side, a bit wrinkled, a bit haggard, but nice-looking on the whole. I also noticed that he frequently held himself aloof, and once or twice I caught sight of him with a kind of disdainful, baffled look on his face, the corner of his mouth fixed in a kind of head-shaking smile of dismissal, so to say, as if he were a little nonplussed by us, though I don’t know why. People said later on that he was of Slovak extraction. A few of our group who spoke the language themselves often formed a small huddle around him.

It was he who served out the soup to us, with a strange long-handled ladle rather like a funnel, while two other men, assistants of some type and likewise not from among us, handed out red enameled bowls and battered spoons — one each between two of us, since the stock was limited, they told us, which was also why, they added, we should return the bowls as soon as they had been emptied. I had to share the soup, bowl, and spoon with “Leatherware,” which I wasn’t too happy about as I had never been used to eating with someone else from a single plate and with the same utensils, but then there’s no knowing, I realized, when needs may bring a person even to this. He took a taste first then promptly passed it to me. He had a slightly peculiar expression on his face. I asked him what it was like, and he told me to try it for myself. By then, however, I could see that the boys around us were all looking at one another, some aghast, some choking with laughter, so I had a taste too: I had to admit that it was indeed, unfortunately, inedible. I asked “Leatherware” what we should do, and he replied that for all he cared I could tip it out if I wanted. At that moment my ears caught a snatch of enlightenment from a cheerful voice behind my back: “This is what they call dörrgemüze,” it was explaining. I glimpsed a squat man, already getting on in years, a whiter patch beneath his nose in the place of a former square of moustache, his face wreathed with well-meant learning. A few people making sour faces were still standing around us, clutching mess tin and spoon, and he told them that he had already played a part in the first world war, the one before this, as a military officer. “That gave plenty of opportunity,” he related, “to become closely acquainted with this dish,” particularly among the German comrades in arms on the front line “whom we were then fighting alongside,” as he put it. According to him, it was actually nothing other than “dried vegetable stew.” “A bit unaccustomed for Hungarian stomachs, of course,” he added, accompanying this with a somehow sympathetic and a slightly forbearing smile. He maintained, however, that it was possible to become accustomed to it — indeed necessary, he reckoned, since it contained plenty of “nutrients and vitamins,” as guaranteed, he explained, by the method of dehydration and the Germans’ expertise in this. “In any case,” he noted with a renewed smile, “the first rule for a good soldier is to eat up everything that is put in front of one, because there’s no knowing what tomorrow will bring”—that’s what he said. At which, true to his word, he spooned up his portion, calmly, steadily, and without a grimace, right down to the last drop. All the same, I still spilled my own portion away at the foot of the barracks wall, exactly as I had already seen a number of other grown-ups and boys do. I was taken aback, though, when I spotted the eyes of our superior looking at me and worried whether I might possibly have upset him; however, that peculiar expression, that indeterminate smile, was all that I thought I detected for a moment on his face again. After that I took the bowl back, receiving in return a thick slab of bread and upon that a blob of white stuff that resembled a toy building brick and was of roughly the same size: butter — or rather, margarine, as we were told. That I did eat up, though I had never before come across bread like this either: rectangular, with crust and inner crumb seemingly both baked from black sludge, embedded in which were bits of chaff and particles that crunched and crackled under the teeth; still, it was bread, and after all I had grown pretty hungry during the long journey. For want of any better means, I smeared the margarine on with my fingers, Robinson Crusoe fashion so to say, which in any case was just what I saw the others were doing. I would have looked for water next, but unfortunately it turned out there was none; hell, I fumed, don’t say we’ll have to go thirsty again after all this, just like on the train.

It was then that we were obliged to pay attention — basically, more seriously than we had thus far — to the smell. I would find it difficult to pin down: sweetish and somehow cloying, with a whiff of the now familiar chemical in it as well, but altogether enough to almost make me fear the bread of a moment ago might be regurgitated. It was not hard to establish that the culprit was a chimney over to the left, in the direction of the metaled road but a fair way beyond that. It was a factory chimney, that was immediately apparent, and that is what people were also told by our superior; specifically a tannery chimney, as many had recognized straightaway. To be sure, it reminded me that on the occasional Sunday back then I had sometimes gone with my father to watch football matches in Újpest, and the streetcar had taken us past a leather works, where there too I had always had to hold my nose on that stretch of the route. For all that, the rumor went, we would not, fortunately, be working in that factory; all being well, and providing there was no outbreak of typhus, dysentery, or other infection among us, we would soon be moving off for another — and, we were assured, friendlier — place. That was also why until then we would not be carrying a number on our jacket and on our skin in particular, like our superior, or “block chief,” as they were now calling him. Many had seen this number for themselves: it was inscribed in light green ink, so the rumor went, on his forearm, indelibly stained or tattooed into the skin with pricks of a specially designed needle. It was at roughly the same time that a conversation between the volunteers who had brought the soup also reached my ears. They too had seen the numbers, likewise imprinted in the skin of the older prisoners in the kitchens. One response above all that did the rounds from mouth to mouth, its significance being furiously probed and repeated around me, was what one of those prisoners had said in reply to an inquiry from one of our own people as to what it was: “ Himmlische Telephonnummer”—“a celestial telephone number,” the prisoner was alleged to have said. I could see the matter was giving everyone a lot of food for thought, and although I could not make much of it, I too found the phrase unquestionably odd. Anyway, that is when people started scrambling around the block chief and his two assistants, coming and going, interrogating them, veritably besieging them with questions, and hastily exchanging information with one another— for instance, about whether there was an epidemic raging. “There is,” was the word on that. What happens to the patients then? “They die.” And the dead? “They’re burned,” we learned. In truth, it slowly became clear that the chimney stack over the way, though I did not catch precisely how, was not actually a tannery but the chimney of a “crematorium,” a place where corpses are reduced to ashes, as we were told the word meant. I certainly took a harder look at it after that. It was a squat, square, widemouthed stack that looked as if it had been brusquely chopped off at its top. I can only say that I did not sense much else than a certain respect — apart from the stench, naturally, in which we were well and truly mired as in some fetid swamp. But then in the distance too, to our repeated astonishment, we were able to make out one more, then another, and again, right on the very horizon of the bright sky, yet another identical stack, two of which were right at that moment billowing out smoke similar to ours, and maybe people were also right to become suspicious of a puff of smoke from behind some sort of sparsely wooded park, and for the question to form in their minds, again rightly in my opinion, as to whether the outbreak could really be such as to produce so many dead.

I can state that even before dusk fell on that first day I fully understood just about everything, by and large. True, in the meantime we had also paid a visit to the latrine barracks, a place that comprised three sort of raised platforms along its entire length in each of which were two holes, so six altogether, over or into which one had to perch or aim, depending on what business one had. Little time was allowed, that’s for sure, as an appearance was soon made by an angry prisoner, this one with a black armband and what looked like a hefty club in his hand, and everyone had to make it scarce just as they were. A couple of other longtime prisoners were also still loitering around; they were more docile, though, even obliging enough to offer a few bits of information. Following the block chief’s directions, we had a considerable trek there and back, the path taking us by an interesting settlement: there were the usual barns behind the barbed-wire fence and between them these strange women (I promptly turned away from one, since dangling out of her unbuttoned dress right at that moment was something to which a bald-headed infant, its cranium glistening in the sun, was tenaciously clinging) and even stranger men in clothes that, threadbare as they were in general, were in the end nevertheless like those worn by people outside, in the free world so to say. By the time we were on the way back, though, I was clear that this was the Gypsies’ camp. I was a bit surprised, since although, guarded as almost everyone back home, myself included, was in their opinion of Gypsies, naturally enough, up till now I had never heard it said that they were actually criminals. Right then a cart arrived on their side of the fence, drawn by small children with harnesses on their shoulders, just like ponies, while alongside them walked a man with a big moustache and a whip in his hand. The load was covered with blankets but there was no mistaking the bread, white loaves at that, peeping through the many gaps and the rags, from which I concluded that they must have a higher status than us after all. Another sight from that walk also stuck in my mind: coming the other way along the path was a man in a white jacket, white trousers with a broad red stripe down the sides, and a black artist’s cap of the kind painters used to wear in the Middle Ages, a stout gentleman’s walking stick in his hand, constantly looking to both sides as he went, and I found it very hard indeed to believe that this distinguished person was, as it was asserted, merely a prisoner, the same as us.

I would be prepared to swear that I didn’t exchange a word with any stranger on the walk, yet it was to this that I can truly ascribe my more precise grasp of the facts. There across the way, at that very moment, fellow passengers from our train were burning — all those who had asked to be taken by car, or who up in front of the doctor had proved unfit due to old age or other reasons, along with little ones and the mothers who were with them and expectant women, so it was said. They too had proceeded from the station to the baths. They too had been informed about the hooks, the numbers, and the washing procedure, just the same as us. The barbers were also there, so it was alleged, and the bars of soap were handed out in just the same way. Then they too had entered the bathroom itself, with the same pipes and showerheads, so I heard, only out of these came, not water, but gas. This did not come to my notice all in one go but piecemeal, each time bringing further details, some disputed, others allowed to stand and added to. All along, I hear, everyone is very civil toward them, swaddling them with solicitude and loving-kindness, and the children play football and sing, while the place where they are suffocated to death lies in a very picturesque area, with lawns, groves of trees, and flower beds, which is why, in the end, it all somehow roused in me a sense of certain jokes, a kind of student prank. Adding to this, if I thought about it, was the crafty way in which, for instance, they had induced me to change clothes simply with the ruse of the hook and the number on it, or had frightened people carrying valuables with the X-rays, for example, which in the end had been no more than empty words. Of course, I was well aware that it was not altogether a joke, looked at from another angle, as I was in a position to convince myself of the outcome, if I may put it that way, with my own eyes and, above all, my increasingly queasy stomach; nevertheless that was my impression, and fundamentally — or at least so I imagined — that must have been pretty much the way it happened. After all, people would have had to meet to discuss this, put their heads together so to say, even if they were not exactly students but mature adults, quite possibly — indeed, in all likelihood — gentlemen in imposing suits, decorations on their chests, cigars in their mouths, presumably all in high command, who were not to be disturbed right then— that is how I imagined it. One of them comes up with the gas, another immediately follows with the bathhouse, a third with the soap, then a fourth adds the flower beds, and so on. Some of the ideas may have provoked more prolonged discussion and amendment, whereas others would have been immediately hailed with delight, the men jumping up (I don’t know why, but I insisted on their jumping up) and slapping one another’s palms — this was all too readily imaginable, at least as far as I was concerned. By dint of many zealous hands and much to-ing and fro-ing, the commanders’ fantasy then becomes reality, and as I had witnessed, there was no room for any doubt about the stunt’s success. Doubtless that is how they had all proceeded from the railway station: the old lady dutifully following her son’s wishes, the little boy with the white shoes and his blonde mother, the stout matron, the old gentleman in the black hat, or the nervous case up in front of the doctor. The “Expert” also crossed my mind: he would most likely have been utterly amazed, I suppose, the poor man. “Rosie” himself said “Poor old Moskovics” with a commiserating shake of the head, and we were all with him on that. Even “Fancyman” let out a cry of “Sweet Jesus!” for, as we were able to worm out of him, the boys’ hunch had been correct: he and that girl at the brickyard had indeed “gone all the way,” and he was now thinking of the possible consequences of that act which might show on her body over time. We recognized that the concern was justified, yet all the same, beyond anxiety, it was as if some other, less readily definable emotion were reflected in his face, and the boys themselves looked on him right then with a certain measure of respect, which I didn’t find so very difficult to understand, naturally.

Another thing that somewhat set me thinking that day was the fact that, as I was informed, this place, this institution, had already been in existence for years, standing here and operating exactly the same way, day after day, but nevertheless, as it were — and I admit this notion may, perhaps, contain a certain element of exaggeration — ready and waiting for me. In any event, our own block chief — more than a few people referred to this with distinct, one could say awe-struck, admiration — had already been living here for four years. It occurred to me that that had been a year of particular significance for me, being when I enrolled at the grammar school. The occasion of the opening ceremony for the school year was still lodged firmly in my memory: I too was there in a dark blue, braided, Hungarian-style uniform, a so-called “Bocskai” suit. Even the headmaster’s words had registered, he himself being a man of distinguished and, now I think back on it, somewhat commanding presence, with severe eyeglasses and a majestic white handlebar moustache. In winding up he had made reference, I recollected, to an ancient Roman philosopher, quoting the tag “non scolae sed vitae discimus”—“we learn for life, not school.” But then in light of that, really, I ought to have been learning all along exclusively about Auschwitz. Everything would have been explained, openly, honestly, reasonably. The thing was, though, that over the four years at school I had heard not a single word about it. Of course, that would have been embarrassing, I conceded, nor indeed did it belong to education, I realized. The drawback, however, was that now I would have to be edified here — to learn, for example, that we are in a “ Konzentrationslager,” a “concentration camp.” Not that these were all the same, it was explained. This one, for example, is a “ Vernichtungslager,” that is to say an “extermination camp,” I was informed. An “Arbeitslager” or “work camp,” on the other hand, it was immediately added, was something quite different: life there was easy, the conditions and food, the rumors went, bore no comparison, which is natural enough as the aim, after all, is also different. Now, given all that, we too would eventually be going to a place like that, unless something should intervene, which indeed it well might in Auschwitz, those around me acknowledged. At all events, under no circumstances was it advisable to report sick, the nuggets of instruction went on. The hospital camp, incidentally, was over that way, right at the foot of one of the chimneys, “Number 2,” as the better-informed were by now casually referring to it in shorthand among themselves. The hazard was concealed in the water, unboiled water — like that, for instance, from which I too had taken a drink on the way from the station to the baths, but there had been no way of knowing that then. To be sure, there had been a notice there, I could not dispute that, but all the same, the soldier ought maybe to have said something as well, I reckoned. But it then occurred to me that, hang on, what mattered was the end result; as best I could tell, I was feeling fine, thank goodness, and so far I had heard no complaints from the boys either.

Later that day, I made my first acquaintance with a number of other particulars, sights, and customs. I might say that, by the afternoon at any rate, in general I heard more information, and there was more talk around me, about prospects and possibilities regarding our future than about the chimney here. There were times when it might not have been there, we did not catch so much as a whiff of it; it all depended which way the wind was blowing, as many discovered. That day I also saw the women too for the first time. A group of men congregating and excitedly swarming around by the barbed-wire fence pointed them out: there they were, true enough, though I found it hard to pick them out in the distance, on the far side of the clayey field that stretched before us — and, above all, to recognize them as being women. They scared me a little, and I noticed that after the initial delight, the excitement at the discovery, the people around me here all fell very quiet. Just one observation, which rang hollow and a little tremulously, reached my ear from nearby: “They’re bald.” In the big hush, I too picked out for the first time, carried by the occasional wafts of a light summer-evening breeze, thinly, squeakily, and barely audibly, but beyond any doubt, the soothing, joyous sound of music, which, combined as it was with the sight, somehow hugely astounded everyone, myself included. I also stood for the first time, without knowing as yet what we were waiting for, in one of the rear rows of the ranks of ten that were drawn up before our barracks — in the same way as all the other prisoners were waiting before all the other barracks, to the side, in front, and behind, as far as the eye could see — and for the first time, on the order to do so, snatched my cap from my head while outside, on the main road, gliding slowly and noiselessly on bicycles in the balmy dusk air, there materialized the figures of three soldiers: a somehow majestic and, I was made to feel, austere sight. It crossed my mind even then: amazing, how long it had been since I had actually come across any soldiers. Only I had to wonder how difficult it would be to recognize the members of that politely spoken, good-humored corps who had greeted us this morning at the train in these men, who listened so coldly, frigidly, and as it were from an unapproachable exaltedness on the far side of the barrier, with one of them making notes in an elongated notebook of some description, to what on this side our block chief (he too with cap in hand) said to them, these somehow almost ominous potentates, who then glided on farther without so much as a single word, sound, or nod. At the same time, a faint noise, a voice, came to my attention, and to my right I noticed a profile straining forward and the protuberant curve of a chest: it was the former army officer. He was whispering in such a way that his lips barely even moved: “Evening roll call,” giving a tiny nod, with a smile and the knowledgeable expression of a man for whom this was all happening in a fashion that was readily comprehensible, perfectly lucid, and in a certain sense, almost — hard to credit — to his satisfaction. It was then that I saw for the first time, with the darkness overtaking us where we stood, the night sky’s hues and also one of its spectacles: Greek fire, a veritable pyrotechnic display of flames and sparks around the entire rim of the sky off to the left. Many of the people around me were whispering or muttering, reiterating: “The crematoriums!…” though by now this was little more than the wonder that accompanies what I might call some kind of natural phenomenon as it were. Later, “Abtreten,” the order to fall out, and I would have been hungry, but then I learned that the bread had, in fact, been our supper, and after all, I had already eaten that this morning. As for the barracks, the “block,” it turned out that it was completely bare inside, a concrete-floored place without any furniture, fittings, or even lights, where it again proved, as in the gendarmerie stable, that a night’s rest could only be accomplished by propping my back against the legs of some boy sitting behind me, while the one sitting in front of me rested against my knees; and since I was by then tired out by the host of new events, experiences, and impressions, and moreover drowsy, I soon dropped off to sleep.

Of the days that followed, much as with those at the brickyard, fewer details have stayed with me — more just their tone, a sense, what I might call a general impression, only I would find that difficult to define. During these days too there was always still something new to learn, see, and experience. During these days too, every now and then, I would still be brushed by a chill of that peculiar sense of strangeness that I first encountered at the sight of the women; every now and then it still happened that I would find myself in a circle of incredulous, drawn faces, people staring at one another and asking one another, “What do you say to that? What do you say to that?” and the answer on such occasions being either nothing or almost invariably: “Ghastly.” But that is not the word, that is not precisely the experience — for me at any rate, naturally — with which I would truly characterize Auschwitz. Among the several hundred inmates of our block, it turned out, the man with the bad luck was also there. He looked a bit odd in his loosely hanging prison uniform, his oversized cap constantly slipping down over his forehead. “What do you say to that?” he too would ask, “What do you say to that?…”—but of course there was not much we could say. And then I would not have much joy trying to follow his hurried and muddled words. He mustn’t think about, or rather that is to say he could and indeed had to think all the time about just one thing, those whom “he had left at home” and for whose sake “he had to be strong,” since they were waiting for him: his wife and two children — that, roughly speaking, is about all I could make out, the gist of it. So anyway, his only main concern, even here, was basically the same as it had been at the customs post, on the train, or in the brickyard: the length of the days. They now started very early indeed, just a fraction after the midsummer sunrise. That is also when I learned how cold the mornings were at Auschwitz; pressed close together to warm one another up, the boys and I would huddle by the side of our barracks opposite the barbed-wire fence, facing the still obliquely lying, ruddy sun. A few hours later, however, we would rather have been seeking some shade. In any event, time passed here too; “Leatherware” was with us here too, and the occasional joke would be cracked; here too, if not horseshoe nails, there were bits of gravel for “Fancyman” to win from us time after time; here too “Rosie” would speak up every now and then: “Now let’s have it in Japanese!” Apart from that, two trips a day to the latrines, in the morning coupled with that to the washroom barracks (a similar place, the sole difference being that instead of the platforms down its length there were three lines of zinc-lined troughs, with a parallel iron pipe fitted over each, through the tiny, closely set holes in which the water trickled), the issuing of rations, roll call in the evening, and not forgetting, of course, the bits of news — I had to make do with that; that was a day’s agenda. Added to that were events such as a “Blocksperre,” or “confinement to barracks,” on the second evening — the first time I saw our chief looking impatient, indeed I might even say irritated— with the distant sounds, an entire jumble of sounds, that filtered across at that time, in which, if one listened very hard in the somewhat stifling darkness of the barracks, one might imagine one could pick out a shriek, a dog barking, and the cracks of shots; or again the spectacle, again from behind the barbed-wire fence, of a procession of those returning from work so it was said, and I had to believe them, because that is how I too saw it, that lying on the makeshift stretchers being dragged over there by the returnees in the rear, those really were dead people, as those around me asserted. For a while, all this constantly gave plenty of work for my imagination, naturally, but not enough, I can affirm, to fill an entire long and inactive day. That is in part how I came to realize: even in Auschwitz, it seems, it is possible to be bored — assuming one is privileged. We hung around and waited in actual fact, if I think about it, for nothing to happen. That boredom, together with that strange anticipation: I think that is the impression, approximately, yes, that is in reality what may truly denote Auschwitz — purely in my eyes, of course.

Something else I have to admit: the next day I ate the soup, and by the third day was even looking forward to it. The meal system in Auschwitz, I have to say, was most peculiar. At the crack of dawn, a liquid of some kind — coffee they called it — would arrive quite soon. Lunch — soup, that is to say — was dished out astonishingly early, around nine o’clock. After that, though, there was nothing at all in this regard right up to the bread and margarine that came at dusk, before Appell; consequently, by the third day I had already struck up a rather close acquaintance with the tormenting sensation of being hungry, and the others all complained about it too. Only “Smoker” made the observation that the sensation was nothing new to him, it was more the cigarettes that he missed, and there was yet another expression on his face, besides his customary laconic air — almost a sense of satisfaction, which was rather irritating at the time, and this, I think, is why the boys dismissed it so quickly.

Amazing as it seemed when I tallied it up afterward, the truth is that I actually spent only three whole days in Auschwitz. By the evening of the fourth day I was again sitting in a train, in one of those by now familiar freight cars. The destination, so we were informed, was “Buchenwald,” and although I was somewhat cautious by now about such promising names, a certain unequivocal tinge of cordiality and even warmth one might say, a hint of a certain tender, dreamy, envious kind of sentiment, on the faces of some of the prisoners who said good-bye to us could not have been altogether misplaced, I felt. I also could not help noticing that many of them were highly knowledgeable old lags, and Prominents at that, as shown by their armbands, caps, and shoes. It was they who saw to everything at the trains; there were only a couple of soldiers whom I saw, farther off by the edge of the ramp, more middle-ranking officer types, and at this quiet place, in the gentle hues of this tranquil evening, nothing at all, or at most only the vastness, reminded me of the station, seething with activity, lights, sounds, and vitality, vibrating and throbbing at every point, where I had once — three-and-a-half days previously, to be precise— disembarked.

There is even less I can now say about the journey: everything happened in the accustomed manner. There were not sixty of us now, but eighty, though now there was no luggage with us, and then again we didn’t have to worry about women either. Here too there was a slop bucket, here too we were hot, and here too we were thirsty; on the other hand, we were also subjected to less temptation in the matter of food: the rations — a larger than usual hunk of bread, a double dollop of margarine, and also a piece of something else, so-called “wurst,” which in appearance was somewhat reminiscent of the sausages back home — were issued to us alongside the train, and I wolfed them down straightaway on the spot, first because I was hungry, then because there would have been nowhere to store them anyway, and also because, as before, they did not tell us that the trip would last three days.

We arrived at Buchenwald likewise in the morning, in clear, sunny weather that was kept cool and fresh by patches of scudding cloud and flurries of light wind. The railway station here, after Auschwitz at any rate, struck one as no more than a sort of cozy country halt. The reception alone was less cordial, for the doors were dragged aside by soldiers rather than prisoners; indeed, it occurred to me this was actually the first genuine and, so to say, overt occasion on which I had come into such proximity, such close contact, with them. I just watched the expeditiousness, the methodical precision, with which it was all accomplished. A few brusque barks: “Alle ’raus! ”—“Los!”—“ Fünferreihen!”— “Bewegt euch!”[8] a few blows, a few whip cracks, an intermittent swing of the boot, an intermittent rifle jab, a number of muffled cries of pain, and our column had been formed and was already on the march, as if it had only taken some pulls on a string, to be joined at the end of the platform, always with the same about-face, by one soldier on each flank for every fifth row — that is, two for every twenty-five striped-uniform men — at roughly one-yard intervals, not dropping their gaze for so much as a second, but now mutely setting direction and pace merely by their tread, keeping in constant life, as it were, every segment of the whole continually moving and undulating column, which somewhat resembled one of those caterpillars in a matchbox that as a child I had guided with the aid of slips of paper and prods, all of which somehow slightly intoxicated, even utterly fascinated, me. I also had to smile a bit as a recollection of the sloppy, practically sheepish escort that the police had supplied back at home that day, going to the gendarmerie, suddenly sprang to mind. And even all the excesses of the gendarmes, I recognized, could only be considered a form of noisy officiousness in comparison with this tight-lipped expertise, perfectly dovetailing in every detail. For all that I could clearly see, for example, their faces, the color of their eyes or hair, this or that individual feature and even blemish, the odd pimple, I was nevertheless somehow unable quite to get a hold on all this, somehow almost had to doubt it: were these beings proceeding here by our side deep down, despite everything, basically similar to ourselves, fashioned, when it came down to it, from much the same human material? But then it occurred to me that my way of looking at it might be flawed, since I myself was not, of course, one and the same.

Even so, I noticed that all the time we were steadily climbing on a gently sloping incline, again on a superb highway, though one that was twisting and not, as at Auschwitz, straight. In the vicinity, I saw a lot of natural greenery, pretty buildings, villas hidden farther back among trees, parks, gardens; the whole area, the scales, all the proportions, striking me, if I may be so bold, as benign — at least to an eye conditioned to Auschwitz. I was surprised by a regular small zoo suddenly appearing on the right-hand side of the road; there were deer, rodents, and other animals as residents, among which a shabby brown bear, greatly excited on hearing our tread, immediately adopted a begging pose and even promptly showed off a few clownish gestures in its cage; on this occasion, though, its efforts were naturally fruitless. We later passed by a statue that stood on the green sward of a clearing wedged between the two forks that the road took here. The work itself, resting on a white plinth and hewn from the same soft, dull, grained white stone, had in my judgment been executed with somewhat rough-and-ready, slapdash artistry. From the stripes carved into its clothing and its bald cranium, but above all from the whole demeanor, it was immediately apparent that this was seeking to portray a prisoner. The head was thrust forward and one leg kicked out high behind in imitation of running, while the two hands, in a cramped grip, were clasping an incredibly massive cube of stone to the abdomen. At first glance, I looked at it merely the way one appraises a work of art, which school too had taught, what I might call totally disinterestedly, but then it crossed my mind that it no doubt also carried a message, though that message could not be considered exactly auspicious, if one thought about it. But then above an ornate iron gate, between two squat stone columns set in the dense barbed-wire fencing, I caught sight of, and soon passed beneath, a structure somewhat reminiscent of the captain’s bridge on a ship: I had arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp.

Buchenwald lies on the crest of one of the elevations in a region of hills and dales. Its air is clear, the countryside varied, with woods all around and the red-tiled roofs of the village houses in the valleys down below delightful to the eye. The bathhouse is situated off to the left. The prisoners are mostly friendly, though somehow in a different way from in Auschwitz. On arrival, here too one is greeted by bathhouse, barbers, disinfectant, and a change of clothes. The stock of the clothes depot, as far as that goes, is exactly the same as at Auschwitz, though the bathhouse here is warmer, the barbers are more careful in carrying out their work, and the storeman at least tries, if only with a cursory glance, to assess your size. Afterward you find yourself in a corridor, in front of a glazed sliding window, and they ask whether you happen to have any gold teeth. Then a compatriot, a longer-term resident with hair, records your name in a big register and hands you a yellow triangle as well as a broad strip, both of linen. In the middle of the triangle, as a sign that you are, after all, a Hungarian, is a big letter “U,” while on the strip you can read a printed number—64921 in my own case, for example. It would be advisable, I was informed, to learn as soon as possible how this was to be pronounced in German, clearly, intelligibly, and in a distinctly articulated fashion, thus: “Vier-und-sechzig, neun, ein-und-zwanzig,” since from now on that was to be the answer I must always give when anyone asks me to identity myself. Here, though, they do not inscribe that number in your skin, and if you were to have been worried on that score and had inquired about it beforehand, in the bathhouse area, the old prisoner would raise his hands and, rolling his eyes to the ceiling in protest, say: “Aber Mensch, um Gotteswillen, wir sind doch hier nicht in Auschwitz!”[9] Nevertheless both number and triangle must be affixed to the breast of the jacket by this evening, specifically with the assistance of the tailors, the sole possessors of needle and thread; if you should get really bored with queuing until sundown, you will be able to put them more in the mood with a certain fraction of your bread or margarine ration, but even without that they will do it willingly enough as, in the end, they are obliged to, so it is said. The Buchenwald climate is cooler than that at Auschwitz, the color of the days gray, and rain often drizzles down. But at Buchenwald it can happen that they spring on you the surprise of a hot, thickened soup of some sort for breakfast; and furthermore I learned that the bread ration is normally one-third of a loaf, but on some days might even be one-half — not the usual one-quarter and on some days one-fifth as at Auschwitz, while the midday soup may contain solid scraps, and in these may be red shreds or even, if you are lucky, an entire chunk of meat; and it was here that I became acquainted with the notion of the “ Zulage,” an extra that you can requisition — the term used by the army officer, likewise present here and looking mightily pleased with himself on such occasions — in the form of wurst or a spoonful of jam along with the margarine. At Buchenwald we lived in tents, in the “ Zeltlager”—“Tent Camp,” or “Kleinlager ”—“Little Camp”—as it was also called, sleeping on hay strewn on the ground, not separately and somewhat tightly packed maybe, but at least horizontally, while here the barbed-wire fence at the back is not, as yet, electrified, though anyone who might step outside the tent at night would be ripped apart by Alsatian dogs, they warned, and if that warning might perhaps surprise you at first hearing, don’t doubt its seriousness. At the other barbed-wire fence, marking the start of the cobblestoned paths, neat green barracks and single-story, stone-built blocks of the main camp proper, sprawling all around farther up the hill, every evening offers good opportunities for bargains in the shape of spoons, knives, mess tins, and clothing from the local, indigenous prisoners who trade there at that hour; one of them offered me a pullover for the price of altogether half a bread ration, as he demonstrated, signaled, and explained, but in the end I didn’t buy it as I had no need of a pullover in summer, and after all, winter, I supposed, was still a long way off. I also saw then just how many variously colored triangles and different letterings they wore, to the point that I ended up not always being able to figure out where a person’s homeland might actually be. Even here, in my immediate surroundings, I picked out lots of dialect words from the speech of the Hungarians, and indeed more than a few times the strange language that I had first heard on the train at Auschwitz, from the odd-looking prisoners who had greeted us. At Buchenwald there was no Appell for the inmates of the Zeltlager , and the washroom was in the open air, or to be more precise beneath the shade of the trees: essentially much the same structure as the one at Auschwitz, except the trough was of stone and, most of all, water trickled, spurted, or at least oozed all day long through the holes in the pipe, and for the first time since I had entered the brickyard, I experienced the miracle of being able to drink when I was thirsty, or even merely when the fancy took me. At Buchenwald too there is a crematorium, naturally, but merely one, and even that is not the camp’s purpose, its essence, its soul, its sense, I make so bold as to declare, for the only people who are burned up here are those who die in the camp, under the ordinary circumstances of camp life so to say. At Buchenwald — so went the rumor that reached my ears, probably originating from old prisoners — it was most particularly advisable to steer clear of the stone quarry, although, it was added, that was now hardly in operation, unlike in their time, as they put it. The camp, I am instructed, has been functioning for seven years, though there are some here from even older camps, among which I heard the names of a certain “Dachau” as well as “Oranienburg” and “Sachsenhausen,” which is when I understood why at the sight of us there was a touch of indulgence in the smiles on the faces of some of the well-dressed Prominents on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, on whom I spotted numbers in the twenty and ten thousands, indeed four- and even three-digit numbers. Close to our camp, I learned, lies the culturally celebrated city of Weimar, the fame of which I had already learned about back home, naturally: here had lived and worked the man who wrote the poem beginning “Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?”[10] that even I know by heart, while somewhere within the area of our camp, so they say, marked with a commemorative plaque and protected from us prisoners by a fence, is a now nobly spreading tree that he planted with his own hand. All things considered, it wasn’t at all difficult to understand those faces at Auschwitz: it is fair to say that I too soon came to like Buchenwald.

Zeitz, or to be more precise the concentration camp named after this place, lies a night’s ride by freight train from Buchenwald, then a farther twenty or twenty-five minutes’ march, under military escort, along a highway fringed by plowed fields and well-cultivated rural land, as I myself had the chance to find out. This would at least be the final place of residence, we were assured, for those from our ranks whose names came before the letter “M” in the alphabet; for the rest the destination was to be a work camp in the city of Magdeburg, which from its historical renown had a more familiar ring to it — so we were informed, while still at Buchenwald, again on the evening of the fourth day, on a monstrous parade ground lit with arc lamps, by various high-ranking prisoners holding long lists in their hands. The only thing I felt sorry about was that it meant I would finally be parted from many of the boys, “Rosie” above all, and then, unfortunately, the sheer vagary of the names by which we were boarded onto the train separated me from all the others too.

I can tell you there is nothing more tiresome, more exhausting, than those exasperating strains that, so it seems, we must undergo each time we arrive at a new concentration camp — that was my experience at Zeitz anyway, after Auschwitz and Buchenwald. I could see straightaway that this time I had arrived at what was no more than some kind of small, mediocre, out-of-the-way, so to say rural concentration camp. It would have been pointless looking for a bathhouse or even a crematorium here: it seems those are trappings only of the more important concentration camps. The countryside too was again a monotonous flatland, with some distant blue range — the “Thuringian Hills,” I heard someone say — visible only from the far end of the camp. The barbed-wire fence, with a watchtower at each of the four corners, stretches right alongside the highway. The camp itself is square in plan — in essence, a large, dusty space that is open over toward the gateway and the highway beyond, while the other sides are enclosed by huge tents the size of an airfield hangar or a circus big top; as it turned out, the only point of the protracted counting, column formation, harassment, and pushing around was to assign the prospective inmates to each and every tent, or “Block” as they called them, and line them up, ten abreast, in front of it. I too finished up at one of them, to be absolutely precise, the tent on the far right in the hindmost row, if one were to take bearings from where I was standing, face to the gate and back to the tent, and for a very long time too, to the point of numbness under the unending burden of that now ever more disagreeable day. It was useless casting glances around in search of the boys; the people around me were all strangers. To my left was a tall, thin, slightly peculiar neighbor, continuously muttering something to himself and rocking his upper body rhythmically to and fro, while to my right was a broad-shouldered man, more on the short side, who spent his time directing tiny spitballs, tersely and highly accurately, at regular intervals into the dust in front of him. He likewise looked at me, the first time just fleetingly but then the next time more searchingly, with his crooked, sparkling, button eyes. Under those I saw a comically small, seemingly almost boneless nose, while he wore his prison cap jauntily tilted to one side of his head. So, he asked on the third occasion, and I noticed that all his front teeth were missing, where did I come from, then? When I told him Budapest, he became quite animated: was the Grand Boulevard still there, and was the No. 6 streetcar still going as it had been when he “last left it,” he immediately inquired. Sure, I told him, everything was the same; he seemed happy at that. He was also curious as to how I “got mixed up in this here,” so I told him: “Simple: I was asked to get off the bus.” “And then?” he quizzed, so I told him that was all: then they transported me here. He seemed to wonder a little at that, as if he were maybe not quite clear about the course life had taken back home, and I was about to ask him… but by then I was unable to do so because at that instant I received a clout on the face from the other side.

I was virtually already sprawling on the ground before I heard the smack and its force began to sting my left cheek. A man was standing in front of me, in black riding dress from head to toe, with a black beret on his head of black hair, even a black pencil moustache on his swarthy features, in what, to me, was a billow of an astonishing odor: no doubt about it, the sweetish fragrance of genuine cologne. All I could pick out from the confused ranting were repeated reiterations of the word “Ruhe,” or “silence.” No mistaking it, he appeared to be a very high-ranking functionary, which the preeminent low number and green triangle with a letter “Z” on his left breast, the silver whistle dangling from a metal chain on the other side, not to speak of the “LÄ” in white lettering sported by his armband, each in itself, only appeared to reinforce. All the same, I was extremely angry as, after all, I was not used to being hit, and whoever it might be, I strove to give expression — decked though I might be, and if only on my face — to passable signs of that rage. He must have spotted it too, I suppose, because I noticed that even as he carried on with his incessant bawling the look in those big, dark eyes, seemingly almost swimming in oil, meanwhile took on an ever-softer and, in the end, well-nigh apologetic air as he ran them attentively over me, from my feet right up to my face; that was somehow an unpleasant, embarrassing feeling. He then rushed off, people stepping aside to make way for him, in the same stormy haste with which he had materialized just beforehand.

After I had picked myself up, the neighbor to the right soon inquired whether it had hurt. I said to him, deliberately loud and clear: no chance. “So it won’t do you any harm to mop your nose, then,” he supposed. I touched the spot, and there was indeed red on my fingers. He showed me how I should tip my head back to stem the bleeding, and made this comment about the man in black: “Gypsy,” then, following a brief pause for reflection, as an afterthought: “The guy’s a homo, that’s for sure.” I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to say, and indeed asked him what the word meant. He chuckled a bit and said: “Like — queer!” That clarified the notion a bit better for me, or near enough, I think. “By the way,” he went on to note, stretching out a hand sideways, “I’m Bandi Citrom,” whereupon I told him my name as well.

He for his part, I later learned, had reached here from a labor camp. He had been conscripted as soon as Hungary entered the war because he had just turned twenty-one: so he was fitted for labor service by virtue of age, race, and condition, and he had not been back home even once in the last four years. He had even been in the Ukraine, on mine-clearing work. “What happened to the teeth, then?” I asked. “Knocked out,” he replied. Now it was my turn to be surprised: “How come…?” But he simply said it was “a long story,” and did not give much else away about the reason. At all events, he “had a run-in with the sergeant of his corps,” and that was when his nose, besides other bones, had been broken: that was all I could get out of him. He was no more forthcoming about the mine-clearing: it took a spade, a length of wire, plus sheer luck, as he put it. That is why very few were left in the “punishment company” at the end, when Germans arrived to replace the Hungarian troops. They had been glad too, because they were immediately offered a prospect of easier work and better treatment. They too, naturally, had stepped off the train at Auschwitz.

I was just about to take the prying a bit further, but right then the three men returned. About ten minutes before that, more or less the only thing I had registered from what was going on up front was a name, or to be more precise an identical bawl from several voices up front, all yelling out “Doctor Kovács!” at which a plump, dough-faced man, with a head shorn by hair-clippers at the sides, but naturally bald in the middle, shyly, reluctantly, and merely in deference to the urgent call as it were, stepped forward, then himself pointed to another two. The three of them had immediately gone off with the man in black, and only subsequently did the news get back to me here, in the last rows, that we had in fact elected a leader, or “Blockältester”—“senior block inmate”—as they called it, and “Stubendiensts ,” or “room attendants,” as I roughly translated it for Bandi Citrom, since he did not speak German himself. They now wanted to instruct us in a few words of command and the actions that went along with these, which — the leaders had been warned, and they warned us in turn — they were not going to go through this more than once. Some of these — the cries of “Achtung!” “Mützen… ab!” and “Mützen… auf!”[11] — I was basically already familiar with from my previous experiences, but new to me was “Korrigiert!” or “Adjust!”—the cap, of course, and “Aus!” or “Dismiss!” at which we were supposed to “slap hands to thighs,” as they said. We then practiced all these a number of times over. The Blockältester, we learned, had one other particular job to do on these occasions, which was to make the report, and he rehearsed this several times over, there in front of us, with one of the Stubendiensts, a stocky, ginger-haired man, with slightly purplish cheeks and a long nose, standing in for the soldier. “ Block fünf,” I could hear him yell, “ist zum Appell angetreten. Es soll zweihundert fünfzig, es ist… ,” and so on, from which I discovered that I too must therefore be an inmate of Block 5, which has a roll of two hundred and fifty men. After a few repetitions this was all clear, comprehensible, and could be performed without error, so everyone reckoned. After that, there followed more minutes with nothing to do, and since in the meantime I noticed, on a piece of empty ground to the right of our tent, some sort of mound with a long pole above it and what could be surmised to be a deep trench behind it, I asked Bandi Citrom what purpose it might serve, in his opinion. “That’s a latrine,” he announced straight off after one swift glance. He then shook his head when it emerged that I wasn’t familiar with that term either. “It’s obvious that you must have been tied to Mummy’s apron strings up till now,” he reckoned. All the same, he explained it in a few pithy words, then added something which, to quote him in full, went: “By the time we fill that with shit, we’ll all be free men!” I laughed, but he kept a serious face, like someone who was really convinced, not to say determined, about this. Nevertheless, he wasn’t given the chance to say anything more about that belief, since right at that moment, all of a sudden, there appeared the severe, very elegant figures of three soldiers who were making their way across from the gateway, without haste but obviously very much at ease, at which the Blockältester yelled out, in a voice that acquired a new edge, a keen and screeching timbre that I had not discerned in it even once during the rehearsals: “Achtung! Mützen… ab!” at which, like everyone else, me included, he too, naturally, snatched his cap from his head.