Fatelessness

SIX

Only in Zeitz did I come to realize that even captivity has its mundane round; indeed, true captivity is actually nothing but a gray mundane round. It was as if I had been in a roughly comparable situation already, that time in the train on the way to Auschwitz; there too everything had hinged on time, and then on each person’s individual capabilities. Except in Zeitz, to stay with my simile, the feeling I had was that the train had come to a standstill. From another angle, though — and this is also true — it rushed along at such speed that I was unable to keep up with all the changes in front of and around me, or even within myself. One thing I can say at least: for my own part, I traveled the entire route, scrupulously exploring every chance that might present itself on the way.

At all events, in any place, even a concentration camp, one gets stuck into a new thing with good intentions, at least that was my experience; for the time being, it was sufficient to become a good prisoner, the rest was in the hands of the future — that, by and large, was how I grasped it, what I based my conduct on, and incidentally was pretty much the same as I saw others were doing in general. I soon noticed, it goes without saying, that those favorable opinions I had heard when still at Auschwitz about the institution of the Arbeitslager must certainly have been founded on somewhat exaggerated reports. As to the entire extent of that exaggeration, and above all the inferences that stemmed from it, however, I did not — nor, in the end, could I — immediately take fully accurate account of this myself, and that was again pretty much what I perceived to be the case with others, indeed I dare say with everyone else, all of the approximately two thousand other prisoners in our camp — the suicides excepted, naturally. But then those cases were uncommon, in no way the rule nor in any way exemplary, everyone recognized. I too got wind of the occasional occurrence of that kind, hearing people arguing and exchanging views about it, some with undisguised disapproval, others more sympathetically, acquaintances with sorrow, but on the whole always in the way of someone striving to form a judgment of a deed that was exceedingly rare, remote to our experience, in some ways hard to explain, maybe slightly frivolous, maybe even slightly honorable, but in any case premature.

The main thing was not to neglect oneself; somehow there would always be a way, for it had never yet happened that there wasn’t a way somehow, as Bandi Citrom instilled in me, and he in turn had been instructed in this wisdom by the labor camp. The first and most important thing under all circumstances was to wash oneself (before the parallel rows of troughs with the perforated iron piping, in the open air, on the side of the camp over toward the highway). Equally essential was a frugal apportioning of the rations, whether or not there were any. Whatever rigor this disciplining might cost you, a portion of the bread ration had to be left for the next morning’s coffee, some of it indeed — by maintaining an undeflectable guard against the inclination of your every thought, and above all your itching fingers, to stray toward your pocket — for the lunch break: that way, and only that way, could you avoid, for instance, the tormenting thought that you had nothing to eat. That the item in your wardrobe I had hitherto regarded as a handkerchief was a foot cloth; that the only secure place to be at roll call and in a marching column was always the middle of a row; that even when soup was being dished out one would do better to aim, not for the front, but for the back of the queue, where you could predict they would be serving from the bottom of the vat, and therefore from the thicker sediment; that one side of the handle of your spoon could be hammered out into a tool that might also serve as a knife — all these things, and much else besides, all of it knowledge essential to prison life, I was taught by Bandi Citrom, learning by watching and myself striving to emulate.

I would never have believed it, yet it is a positive fact that nowhere is a certain discipline, a certain exemplariness, I might even say virtue, in one’s conduct of life as obviously important as it is in captivity. It suffices merely to take a little look around the area of Block 1, where the camp’s native inmates live. The yellow triangles on their chests tell you all you really need to know, while the letter “L” in them discloses the incidental circumstance that they have come from distant Latvia, more specifically from the city of Riga, I was informed. Among them one can see those peculiar beings who at first were a little disconcerting. Viewed from a certain distance, they are senilely doddering old codgers, and with their heads retracted into their necks, their noses sticking out from their faces, the filthy prison duds that they wear hanging loosely from their shoulders, even on the hottest summer’s day they put one in mind of winter crows with a perpetual chill. As if with each and every single stiff, halting step they take one were to ask: is such an effort really worth the trouble? These mobile question marks, for I could characterize not only their outward appearance but perhaps even almost their very exiguousness in no other way, are known in the concentration camps as “Musulmänner ” or “Muslims,” I was told. Bandi Citrom promptly warned me away from them: “You lose any will to live just looking at them,” he reckoned, and there was some truth in that, though as time passed I also came to realize it takes much more than just that.

For example, your first device is stubbornness: it may have come in varying forms, but I can tell you there was no lack of it at Zeitz, and at times it can be of immense assistance, so I observed. For instance, I found out more from Bandi Citrom about that weird band, collection, breed, or whatever one should call them, a specimen of which — on my left in the row — had already somewhat astonished me on my arrival. It was he who told me that we call them “Finns.” Certainly if you ask them where they are from, they really do reply — if they see fit to give you any answer at all, that is — something like “ fin Minkács,” for example, by which they mean they are from Munkachevo, or “fin Sadarada,” which, for example (and you have to guess), is Sátoraljaújhely. Bandi Citrom already knows their organization from labor camp and doesn’t speak very highly of it. They can be seen everywhere, at work, while marching or at Appell , rocking rhythmically back and forth as they unflaggingly mutter their prayers to themselves, like some unrepayable debt. When meanwhile they speak out of the corner of the mouth to whisper across something like, “Knife for sale,” you don’t pay any attention. All the less so, however tempting it may be, especially in the morning, when it is “Soup for sale,” because, however strange it may sound, they don’t touch soup nor even the sausage that we occasionally get — nothing prescribed by their religion. “So what do they live on?” you might well ask, and Bandi Citrom would reply: you don’t have to worry about them, they look after themselves. He would be right too because, as you see, they stay alive. Among one another and with the Latvians they use Yiddish, but they also speak German, Slovakian, and a smattering of who knows what, only not Hungarian — unless it’s a question of doing business, of course. On one occasion (there was no getting out of it), as luck would have it, I ended up in their work Kommando. Their first question was “Rayds di yiddish?” When I told them that, no, unfortunately I didn’t, that was it as far as they were concerned, I became a nonperson, they looked at me as if I were thin air, or rather didn’t exist at all. I tried to speak, get myself noticed, but to no avail. “ Di bisht nisht kai yid, d’bisht a shaygets,”[12] they shook their heads, and I could only wonder at how people who after all were reputedly at home in the business world could cling so irrationally to something from which the harm to them was so much more, the losses so much greater, than any gains with regard to the end result. That day I learned that the discomfiture, the skin-crawling awkwardness which at times took hold between us was already familiar to me from back home, as if there had been something not quite right about me, as if I did not quite measure up to the proper ideal, in short as if I were somehow Jewish — a rather odd feeling to have after all, I reckoned, in the midst of Jews, in a concentration camp.

At other times it was Bandi Citrom who slightly amazed me. Whether at work or during a break, I often heard, and quickly learned from him, his favorite song, which he had brought with him from his labor service days in the punishment company: “We clear mines from land in the Uk-raine, / But even there we’re never chicken…” was how it began, and I was specially fond of the closing lines, which go: “If a com-rade, a good bud-dy, should be lost, / For those back home our ri-poste / Is: / Come of us what may, / Our dear old home-land, / We’ll not de-ceive you, at any cost.” A noble sentiment, undeniably, and the somber tune, more on the slow side than snappy, along with the ditty as a whole, did not fail to exert their influence on me too, naturally— only somehow they merely jogged my memory of the gendarme, that time back on the train, when he reminded us of our being Hungarian; only in the end, strictly speaking, the homeland had punished them too. I mentioned this to him once, what’s more. He did not come up with any counterargument either, yet he seemed to be just a little put out, even annoyed one could say. On some occasion the next day, though, very wrapped up in something, he again started whistling, humming, and finally singing it as if any recollection of that had been clean forgotten. Another frequently repeated refrain was that he would again “set foot on the pavements of Forget-me-not Road,” that being where he lived back home, and he mentioned the street, even the number of the house, so many times and in so many ways that finally I too knew all its attractions by heart, almost longed to go there myself, even though in my own recollections I actually knew it only as a fairly secluded backstreet somewhere in the neighborhood of the Eastern Railway Terminal. He often spoke about, evoked, and also reminded me of other places too, squares, avenues, houses, as well as certain well-known slogans and advertising signs that blazed on their roofs and in various shopwindows—“the lights of Budapest” as he called them, though here I had to correct him, being obliged to point out that those lights no longer existed on account of the blackout regulations, and the bombing, to be sure, had knocked the city’s panorama about a bit here and there. He fell silent, but as far as I could make out the news was not very much to his liking. The next day, though, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, he again started to go on about the lights.

But then, could anyone be acquainted with all the variants of stubbornness? For I can assure you, had I but known, there were many variants I could have chosen from in Zeitz. I heard about the past, the future, and a lot, a very great deal, about freedom above all; indeed, I can safely say, nowhere does one hear as much about it, it seems, as among prisoners, which naturally makes a lot of sense after all, I suppose. Yet others took some strange pleasure in an adage, a joke, a wisecrack of sorts. I heard this one myself, naturally. There is an hour of the day which falls between returning from the factory and the evening Appell, a distinctive, always bustling, and liberated hour that I, for my part, always looked forward to and enjoyed the most while in the Lager; as it happened, this was generally also supper time. I was just pushing my way through the milling, trading, and chatting knots of people when someone bumped into me, and a pair of tiny, worried eyes above a singular nose gazed at me from under the loose-fitting convict’s cap. “I don’t believe it,” we both said almost simultaneously, as he had recognized me and I him, the man with the bad luck. He immediately appeared to be delighted and inquired where my quarters were. Block 5, I told him. “Pity,” he said regretfully, since he was lodged elsewhere. He complained that he didn’t “get to see familiar faces,” and when I told him that I didn’t either he somehow looked crestfallen, though I don’t know why. “We’re becoming split up, all split up,” he observed with an implication in his words and the shaking of his head that was somewhat lost on me. Then his face brightened all of a sudden, and he asked, “Do you know what this here,” pointing to his chest, “this letter ‘U,’ signifies?” Sure I did, I told him: “Ungar, Hungarian.” “No,” he answered, “Unschuldig,” meaning “innocent,” then gave a snort of laughter followed by prolonged nodding of the head with a brooding expression, as if the notion were somehow highly gratifying, though I have no idea why. Subsequently, and quite often in the beginning, I saw the same on others in the camp from whom I also heard that wisecrack, as if they derived some warming, fortifying emotion from it — that at least is what was suggested by the unfailingly identical laugh and then that same softening of features, the dolefully smiling and yet somehow euphoric expression with which they told and hailed this witticism each and every time they told it, in much the same sort of way as when a person hears music that deeply touches his feelings or some particularly moving story.

Yet all the same, with them too what I noticed was the same endeavor, the same good intention: they too wanted merely to be seen as good prisoners. Make no mistake about it, that was in our interest, that is what the conditions called for, that is what life there, if I may put it this way, compelled us to do. If the rows were perfectly in line and the numbers tallied, for instance, the roll call did not last so long — at least to start with. If one was diligent at work, for example, then one might avoid a beating — usually, at any rate.

Even so, at least to start with, I believe the thinking of each and every one of us cannot have been guided entirely by that gain alone, not exclusively by that kind of benefit alone, I can honestly say. Take work, for example, the first afternoon of work, to start with that straightaway: the task was to unload a wagon of gray gravel. If, after Bandi Citrom and I — naturally having sought permission beforehand from the guard: on this occasion, a soldier who was getting on in years and, at first glance, more docile-looking — had stripped down to the waist (that was the first time I saw his golden-brown skin with the big, smooth muscles lithe under it and the darker patch of a birthmark below the left breast), he said, “Now then, let’s show these guys what Budapesters can do!” then he meant that perfectly seriously. And I tell you, considering it was after all the first time in my life that I had handled a pitchfork, that both the guard and the foreman-type guy, no doubt from the factory, who would nose around every now and then seemed rather satisfied, which only made us reintensify our efforts, naturally. If, on the other hand, a stinging sensation declared itself on my palms after a time, and I saw blood all around the base of my fingers, and then our guard in the meanwhile called over: “ Was is denn los?”[13] so I laughed and held up my palm to show him, whereupon he, abruptly turning surly, even giving a jerk on his rifle strap, demanded: “Arbeiten! Aber los!”[14] — then it was only natural, in the end, that my own interests should also turn to other things. From then on, I paid attention to just one thing: the times when he did not have his eyes on me, so I could steal the occasional quick breather, or how I might put as little as possible on my spade, shovel, or pitchfork; and I can tell you, later on I made very considerable progress in such tactics, at any rate gaining a great deal more expertise, schooling, and practice with them than in the performance of any job of work that I completed. And anyway, who profits from it, after all? — as I recall the “Expert” once asking. I maintain there was some problem here, some obstacle, some mistake, some breakdown. A word, a sign, a glimmering of appreciation now and again, nothing more, just a scintilla, might have proved more efficacious, for me at any rate. For what malice do we in fact have to bear against one another at the individual level, if one thinks about it? And then, after all, one retains a sense of pride even in captivity, so who would not, in the final analysis, lay claim, in his heart of hearts, to a drop of kindness, to say nothing of getting further with a considerate word, so I found.

Still, at bottom, experiences of that kind could not truly shake me as yet. Even the train was still running; if I looked ahead, I dimly sensed the destination somewhere in the distance, and in the initial period — the golden days, as Bandi Citrom and I later dubbed them — Zeitz, along with the conduct it required and a dash of luck, proved a very tolerable place — for the time being, that is, in the interim, until a time to come should secure release from it, naturally. Half a loaf of bread twice a week, a third of a loaf — three times, a quarter— twice only, fairly regular Zulage, boiled potatoes once a week (six spuds, doled out in one’s cap, though more than likely there would be no Zulage to go with them), noodle milk pudding once a week. One is soon made to forget any initial annoyance at the early reveille by dewy summer dawns, the unclouded sky, and then a steaming mug of coffee too (and you need to be smart at the latrines, as the cry of “Appell! Antreten!” will soon resound). The morning muster, in all likelihood, is bound to be short: after all, work beckons, presses. One of the factory side-gates that we prisoners are also allowed to use lies off to the left of the highway, down a sandy footpath about ten to fifteen minutes’ walk from our camp. Already from a long way off, there is a rumbling, clattering, throbbing, panting, a hacking cough of three or four iron throats: the greetings of the factory, though more a veritable town, what with its main and side roads, slowly trundling cranes, earth-grabbing machines, profusion of rail tracks, its labyrinth of flues, cooling towers, piping, and workshop buildings. The many pits, ditches, ruins, and cave-ins, the mass of ripped-up conduits and spilled-out cables, attest to visitations by aircraft. Its name, as I learned as soon as the first lunch break, is “Brabag,” which is “the shorthand formerly used even on the stock market” to refer to the “Braun-Kohl-Benzin Aktiengesellschaft”[15] so I heard; moreover a burly man who was just then resting his weight on one elbow with a weary sigh as he fished a nibbled hunk of bread from his pocket was pointed out as the one who was the source of that information and, it was subsequently rumored in the camp, always accompanied by a touch of glee, and who had also formerly owned a few shares in the company, I gathered (though I never heard him personally say as much) — and the smell alone may well have reminded me of the oil works in Csepel — that here too they are hard at work producing gasoline, though by dint of some ingenious trick that allows them to extract it from lignite rather than oil. I thought this was an interesting concept, even though I was well aware that wasn’t what they were looking for from me, naturally. The options offered by the work squads, the Arbeitskommandos, are always a matter of lively debate. Some swear by spades, others by pitchforks for choice; some proclaim the advantages of cable-laying work, yet others prefer being assigned to the cement mixers, while who could divine what hidden motive, what dubious predilection, makes certain individuals particularly attached to work on the drains of all things, up to their waists in yellow slime or black oil, though no one doubts the existence of such a motive since most of them happen to be from among the Latvians, plus of course their like-minded friends, the Finns. Only once a day does the word “Antreten,”[16]wafting down from on high, have a long, drawn-out, and inviting bittersweet lilt, and that is in the evening, when it signals the time to return home. Bandi Citrom squeezes through the throng around the washbasins with a shout of “Move over, Muslims!” and no part of my body can be kept hidden from his scrutiny. “Wash your pecker too! That’s where the lice lodge,” he’ll say, and I comply with a laugh. This marks the start of that particular hour, that hour of odd matters to attend to, of jokes or complaints, visits, discussions, business deals, and exchanges of information that only the homely clatter of cauldrons, the signal that galvanizes everyone, stirs everyone into quick action, is capable of breaking. Then “Appell!” and it’s a matter of sheer luck how long for. But then, after a lapse of one, two, or, tops, three hours (with the arc lights going on in the meantime), the great rush along the narrow gangway of the tent, hemmed in on both sides by rows of three-tier bunk-bedding spaces, here called “boxes.” After that, for a while yet, the tent is all semidarkness and whispering; this is the time for spinning yarns, tales about the past, the future, freedom. I got to learn that back home everyone had been a very model of happiness, usually wealthy as well. It was also at this time that I could get an idea what people used to have for their supper, and even, from time to time, certain other topics of what, between men, sounded like a confidential nature. It was then that speculations were debated (though I never heard anything more about it later on) that a form of sedative, a “bromide,” was being mixed into the soup for some particular reason— that’s what was alleged at any rate, amid exchanges of knowing and always slightly enigmatic looks. Bandi Citrom too could always be relied on at this time to bring up Forget-me-not Road, the lights or — particularly in the early days, though there were not that many observations of my own that I could make on the subject, naturally — the “Budapest girls.” At other times, I would become aware of a suspicious muttering, a quiet, stifled chanting and shaded candlelight coming from one of the corners of the tent, and I heard that it was Friday night, and across there was a priest, a rabbi. I scrambled over the tops of the plank-beds to take a look for myself, and in the middle of a group of men it actually was him, the rabbi I already knew. He was going through the devotions just as he was, in prison garb and hat, but I did not watch him for long since I yearned more for sleep than prayers. I am berthed with Bandi Citrom on the uppermost tier. We share our box with two more bedfellows, both young, likable, and also from Budapest. Wooden planks with straw on them and sacking over the straw serve for bedding. We have one blanket between two, though in the end even that is too much in summertime. We don’t exactly have a terrific abundance of space: if I turn over, my neighbor has to do the same, and if my neighbor draws his legs up, I have to do the same; still, even so, sleep was deep and expunged all memories. Those were golden days, indeed.

I began to notice the changes a bit later on — in the matter of rations, first and foremost. I and the others could only speculate how the era of half-loaves could have flown by so swiftly; into its place, at all events, irreversibly stepped the era of thirds and quarters, even the Zulage was no longer always an absolute certainty. That is also when the train began to slow down and eventually came to a standstill altogether. I tried to look ahead, but the prospect stretched only to tomorrow, while tomorrow was an identical day, that is to say, another day exactly the same as today — in the best case, of course. My zest dwindled, my drive dwindled, every day it was that little bit harder to get up, every day I turned in for sleep that little bit wearier. I was that little bit hungrier, found it took that little bit more effort to walk, somehow everything started to become harder, with me becoming a burden even to myself. I (all of us, I dare say) was no longer absolutely always a good prisoner, and we were soon able to recognize the reflections of this, of course, in the soldiers, not to speak of our own functionaries, and among these, if only by virtue of his rank, the Lagerältester.

He is still only ever to be seen, anytime and anywhere, in black. It is he who shrills the morning whistle for reveille, he who inspects everything last thing in the evening, and all sorts of things are said about his living quarters somewhere up at the front. German by language, Gypsy by race — even among ourselves he is only known as “the Gypsy”—which is also the primary reason why a concentration camp was designated as his abode, the other being the deviant streak in his nature that Bandi Citrom had immediately sized up at first glance. The green triangle, on the other hand, was a warning to all that he had robbed and killed a lady who allegedly was older and also, so the rumor goes, very rich, and had in fact been his means of support, so it was said; this was therefore the first time in my life I had the chance to see a genuine murderer in person. His duty was the law; his job, to enforce order and justice in our camp — not exactly a particularly comforting thought at first hearing, everyone reckoned, myself included. On the other hand, I was made to see that at a certain point nuances can be deceptive. I personally, for instance, had more trouble with one of the Stubendiensts, even though he is an irreproachably honest man. That is indeed why he was elected by the same close acquaintances who chose Dr. Kovács the Blockältester (that title, I gathered, denotes his status as a lawyer, not a physician), all of them being from the same place, so I hear, the picturesque area around Siófok on the southern shore of Lake Balaton. I mean the ginger-headed guy known universally as Fodor. Now, whether it is true or not, there is general agreement: the Lagerältester uses his club or fist for fun, because, according to camp gossip at any rate, he supposedly derives a certain pleasure from that, something related to what he is also after, the better-informed profess to know, with men, boys, and sometimes even women. With Fodor, though, order is not a pretext but a veritable precondition, and should necessity compel him to act in a similar manner, that is in the general interest — as he never omits to mention. Still, order is never total, indeed ever less so. That may be why he feels obliged to lash out with the long handle of the ladle among those pushing in the queue, and this is how— should one fail by some accident to know the way to approach the soup vat, placing one’s bowl precisely at a defined spot on its rim — one may join the ranks of the illstarred out of whose hands mess tin and soup might easily go flying on such an occasion, because — no question, and the approving murmur behind one indeed signals as much — one is thereby holding him up in his work and therefore also us, those next in line, and also why he pulls Seven Sleepers down from the bunks by the legs, for after all, the sins of one will be visited upon the innocent others. A distinction in intention has to be drawn, naturally, but what I am saying is that such nuances can become blurred at a certain point, while the end result, in my experience, was the same, whichever way I looked at it.

Apart from them, another one here is the German Kapo,[17] with his yellow armband and always immaculately ironed striped outfit, whom I did not see much of, fortunately, but later on, to my utter amazement, the occasional black armband with the humbler inscription of “ Vorarbeiter”[18] upon it also began to appear in our ranks. I happened to be there when one person from our block, until then not particularly conspicuous as far as I was concerned, nor, to the best of my recollection, particularly highly regarded by or well-known to others, but otherwise a vigorous, hefty man, appeared at supper for the very first time with his brand-new armband. But now, I could not help noticing, he was no longer that anonymous person: friends and acquaintances could hardly get near him, what with all the words and hands of rejoicing, congratulation, and good wishes on his promotion that were being offered from all sides, which he accepted from some but not, I noticed, from others, who then hastily made themselves scarce. Eventually the most ceremonious moment of all, for me at least, occurred when, with all eyes on him and in the midst of a form of respectful and even, I might say, reverential hush, very dignified, not hurrying a bit, not hastening a bit, he stepped up in a barrage of amazed or envious looks for the second helping that now befitted his rank, and one from the very bottom of the vat at that, which the Stubendienst ladled out for him with the discrimination now due to those granted that right.

On another occasion, the letters flaunted themselves at me from the arm of a man with a haughty stride and puffed-up chest whom I immediately recognized as the former army officer from Auschwitz. One day I even found myself under his charge, and I can confirm: it’s true that he would go through fire and water for his good men, but loafers and shirkers who got others to do the dirty work could expect no laurels from him, as he himself announced, in those very words, when work started. Still, the next day Bandi Citrom and I considered it better to slip into another work-gang.

One other change also caught my eye, interestingly enough with the outsiders most of all, the men in the factory, our guards, but particularly one or another of the Prominents within our camp: they altered, I noticed. I did not quite know what this could be put down to at first: somehow they all looked very splendid, at least in my eyes. It was only later, from one piece of evidence and another, that I realized it was us who had changed, naturally; only this had been harder to spot. If I looked at Bandi Citrom, for example, I would notice nothing odd about him. But when I tried to think back and compare him with his initial appearance, back then, on my right in the row, or the very first time at work, his sinews and muscles still rippling, bulging, dimpling, lithely flexing, or ruggedly straining, like an illustration in a biology textbook as it were, then, to be sure, I found it a little hard to credit. Only then did I understand that time can sometimes play tricks on one’s eyes, it seems. That is also how this process, readily measurable though its results were, could escape my notice with an entire family, the Kollmann family, for instance. Everyone in the camp knows them. They hail from a small town in eastern Hungary by the name of Kisvárda, from which many others here have come, and I deduced from the way that people spoke to or about them that they must no doubt have been people of some standing. There are three of them: the father, bald and short, a taller and a shorter son, their faces dissimilar to their father’s but spitting images of each other (and thus, I assume, quite probably of their mama’s), with identical fair whiskers, identical blue eyes. The three of them always go about together, whenever possible, hand in hand. But then, after a while, I noticed that the father kept falling behind, and the two sons had to help him, tugging him along with them by the hand. After yet another while, the father was no longer between them. Soon after that, the bigger one had to tow the smaller one in the same manner. Later still he too vanished, with the bigger one merely dragging himself along, though recently I have not seen even him around anywhere. Like I say, I saw all that, only not the way that I was now able, if I thought about it, to review it, to reel through it like a film so to say, but only frame by frame, becoming habituated to each single image again and again, and so consequently not actually noticing at all. Yet it seems I myself may have changed, since “Leatherware,” whom I spotted one day looking very much at home as he stepped out of the kitchen tent — and I learned that he had indeed found a position for himself among the enviable dignitaries of the potato-peelers — was initially not at all willing to believe it was me. I protested that it really was me, from “Shell,” then went on to ask whether, seeing as it was the kitchen, there happened to be any scraps to eat, some leftovers perhaps, possibly something from the bottom of the cauldrons. He said he would have a look, and though he was not seeking anything for his own part, did I have a cigarette by any chance, since the kitchen Vorarbeiter was “dying for smokes,” as he put it. I admitted that I had none, then he went away. Not too long after, I realized that I would be wasting time to hang around anymore, and that even friendship evidently has its limits, with the boundaries being set by the laws of life — and quite naturally so, no two ways about it. Another time it was me who didn’t recognize a strange creature who was just then coming my way, presumably stumbling along toward the latrines. His convict’s cap slipping down onto his ears, his face all sunken, pinched, and peaky, a jaundiced dewdrop on the tip of his nose. “Fancyman!” I called out: he did not so much as look up. He just shuffled on, one hand holding his trousers up, and I thought to myself: Can you beat that! Who’d have thought it! On yet another occasion, only this time even more jaundiced, even skinnier, the eyes even a touch larger and more feverish, I think it was “Smoker” I caught sight of. It was around then that the Blockältester’s reports at evening and morning roll calls started to include an occasional phrase that was subsequently to become a permanent feature, changing only in respect of the numbers: “ Zwei im Revier,” or “Fünf im Revier,” “Dreizehn im Revier,”[19] and so on, and later on also the new notion of shortfalls, the missing, losses, the “ Abgang” that is to say. No, under certain circumstances not even good intentions are enough. When I was still back at home, I had read that in time, and of course with the requisite effort, a person can become accustomed even to a prisoner’s life. That may well be so, I don’t doubt it: for instance, in Hungary let’s say, in some kind of regular, proper civilian prison, or whatever I am supposed to call it. Only in a concentration camp, going by my experience, there is not much chance of that, to be sure. I can confidently say that, in my case at least, it was never for want of effort, for want of good intentions; the trouble is that they simply don’t allow enough time.

I know of (because I saw, heard of, or experienced them for myself) three means of escape in a concentration camp. I personally availed myself of the first, though perhaps, I admit, the most modest of the three — but then, there is a corner of one’s nature that, as indeed I came to learn, is a person’s accepted and inalienable possession. The fact is, one’s imagination remains unfettered even in captivity. I contrived, for instance, that while my hands were busy with a spade or mattock — sparingly, carefully paced, always restricted to just the movements that were absolutely necessary — I myself was simply absent. Still, even the imagination is not completely unbounded, or at least is unbounded only within limits, I have found. After all, with the same effort I could equally have been anywhere — Calcutta, Florida, the loveliest places in the world. Yet that would not have been serious enough, all the same, for me that was not credible, if I may put it that way, so as a result I usually found myself merely back home. True, make no mistake about it, I was no less audacious in doing that than I would have been with, say, Calcutta; only here I hit upon something, a certain modesty and, I might say, a kind of work that compensated and thereby, as it were, promptly authenticated the effort. I soon realized, for example, that I had not been living properly, had not made good use of my days back home; there was much for me to regret, far too much. Thus, I could not help recalling, there had been dishes that I had been fussy about, had picked at then pushed aside, simply because I didn’t like them, and right at the present moment I regarded that as an irreparable omission. Then there was the whole senseless tug-of-war between my father and mother over me. When I get back home, I reflected, just like that, with this simple, self-explanatory turn of phrase, not even so much as pausing over it, like someone who can be interested in nothing but the issues that ensued from this all-surpassingly natural fact — when I get back home I shall put a stop to that at any rate, there has to be a truce, I decided. Then there were matters back home over which I had fretted, indeed— however silly it may sound — had been scared of, such as certain subjects in the curriculum, the teachers of those subjects, being quizzed on them and maybe coming to grief in my answers, and lastly my father when I reported the outcome to him: now I would summon up these fears purely for the diversion of picturing them to myself, living through them again, and smiling over them. But my favorite pastime was always, however often, to visualize an entire, unbroken day back home, from the morning right through the evening if possible, while still, as before, keeping it purely on the modest scale. After all, it would have taken an effort for me to conjure up even some kind of special or perfect day, but then I normally only envisaged a rotten day, with an early rising, school, anxiety, a lousy lunch, the many opportunities they had offered back then that I had missed, rejected, or indeed completely overlooked, and I can tell you that now, here in the concentration camp, I set them all right to the greatest possible perfection. I had already heard, and now I can also attest: the confines of prison walls cannot impose boundaries on the flights of one’s fantasy. The only snag was that if they meanwhile went so far as to make me forget even my hands, the nonetheless still all-too-present reality might reassume its rights very swiftly, with the most cogent and explicit of all rationales.

Around that time, there were occasions at the camp when it happened that the roll at the morning Appell did not tally — like the other day in Block 6, next to us. Everyone was perfectly well aware what might have occurred, since reveille in a concentration camp does not awaken anyone who can no longer be awakened, and there are such cases. But then that is the second method of escape, and who has not felt that temptation, if only the once, a single time at least; who could remain unfalteringly steadfast, most especially in the morning, when one awakes to — no, has dawn on one — yet another new day in the environs of an already noisy tent, neighbors already making preparations to go: I, for one, could not, and I would undoubtedly have made an attempt, had Bandi Citrom not prevented me from doing so time after time. Coffee is not so important in the end, and anyway you will be there for Appell, you think to yourself, as indeed did I. Naturally, you do not stay in your bunk — no one is that infantile after all — but get up, properly, honorably, just like the rest, but then… you know of a place, an absolutely safe nook, you would stake a hundred to one on it. You had picked it out, spotted it, or it caught your eye yesterday or maybe even longer ago, quite by chance, without any plan or premeditation, doing no more than vaguely intimating it to yourself. Now it comes to mind. You might squeeze beneath the lowest boxes, for example. Or seek out that hundred-percent-sure crevice, hollow, niche, or nook, then cover yourself well with straw, litter, blankets. All the time with the thought continually in your head that you are going to attend Appell. Yes, there was a time, I tell you, when I understood that well, very well indeed. The bolder ones may even suppose that a single person will somehow pass unnoticed; there might be a miscount, for example — people are only human after all: a single shortfall, just today, just this morning, is not necessarily going to be conspicuous, and anyway, by the evening the numbers will add up, you’ll make sure of that; the even more reckless, that there is no way or means by which anyone will ever be able to find them in that safe place. But those who are really determined will not think even of that, as they simply consider — and there have been times when I too supposed the same — that an hour or so’s good sleep, in the end, is worth any risk, any price.

But then there is not much chance of them getting that much, for in the morning everything unrolls swiftly. Look! A search party is already forming up in great haste, the Lagerältester in black, freshly shaven, fragrant, with dashing moustache at its head, the German Kapo close behind, and behind him a couple of senior block inmates and Stubendiensts, with clubs, bludgeons, and hooked sticks all grasped at the ready, and they turn straight into Block 6. From inside a clamor, pandemonium, and just a couple of minutes later— listen to that! — the triumphant, strident jubilation of those who have found the trail. A sort of squeaking is mingled into that, ever feebler and eventually stilling altogether, and before long the hunters themselves emerge. That thing they are lugging along out of the tent — from here it looks by now like no more than a motionless pile of inanimate objects, a tangle of rags — is tossed down at the very end of the row and left lying there: I do my best not to look over. Yet a shattered detail, a contour, lineament, or distinctive feature that can be made out even so, would draw, compel me to look across, and I did indeed recognize it as the man who had bad luck. After which: “Arbeitskommandos antreten!”—and we can depend on it that the soldiers are going to be stricter today.

Finally, the third, the literal, and true mode of escape can also come into play, it seems; there was a single instance of this too in our camp, a one-off occasion. There were three escapees, all three Latvians, seasoned prisoners, well equipped with German and local knowledge, sure of themselves — that was the whispered rumor doing the rounds, and I can tell you that after the initial realization and secret glee — even, here and there, awe — at the expense of our guards and a nascent burst of enthusiasm as we contemplated emulating the example and weighed up the chances, we were also pretty incensed about them, every one of us, by that night, around two or three a.m., when we were still standing (though tottering would be the more accurate word for it) at Appell in punishment for their action. The evening of the next day, on marching back, I again had to do my best not to look over to the right. Three chairs were placed there, and on them were seated three men, or men of sorts. Precisely what kind of sight they may have presented, and what may have been inscribed in clumsy big letters on the paper sign hanging from their necks — I felt it simpler not to ask about all that (I got to know anyway, because it was a topic of conversation in the camp for a long time after: “Hurrah! Ich bin wieder da!”—or in other words, “Hooray, I’m back again today!”), apart from which I also saw another piece of gimcrackery, a stand which reminded me a bit of the carpet-beating racks in the courtyards of apartment blocks back home, on which there were three ropes tied in nooses — and thus, I realized, a gallows. Naturally, there could be no question of supper, but right away “Appell!” and then: “Das ganze Lager: Achtung!”[20] as the Lagerältester in person, up front, bellowed at the top of his lungs. The customary punishment squad assembled, then, after a further wait, the representatives of the military authorities made their appearance, after which everything went ahead in due form, if I may put it that way — fortunately, up front near the washroom, far from where we were, not that I watched anyway. My attention was drawn rather to my left, from where all at once came a sound, a muttering, some sort of song. In the row I saw a slightly tremulous head on a scraggy, forward-stretched neck — little more, in fact, than a nose and a huge, moist eye that, right at that moment, was somehow swimming in a crazy light: the rabbi. Soon I also picked out his words, particularly after others in the row had slowly taken them up from him — all the Finns, for instance, but many others as well. Indeed, though I don’t know what the mechanism was, it somehow passed across to nearby groups, the other blocks, spreading and gaining ground as it were, because there too I observed a growing number of lips in motion and shoulders, necks, and heads cautiously, almost imperceptibly, yet distinctly rocking back and forth. Meanwhile the muttering was just about audible here, in the center of the row, with a continual “Yitgaddal ve-yitkaddash”[21]being sounded over and over again, like some murmur issuing from the ground below, and even I knew that this was the so-called “Kaddish,” the Jews’ prayer of mourning for the dead. It is quite possible that this too was sheer stubbornness, the final, sole, and perhaps, I could not help realizing, in some ways slightly forced, I might almost say prescribed and in a certain sense fixed, so to say imposed, and, at the same time, useless mode of stubbornness (for it altered nothing up at the front: apart from the last few twitches of the hanged men, nothing moved, nothing wavered at these words); yet all the same, I could not help somehow understanding the emotion in which the rabbi’s expression seemed almost to dissolve, and even his nostrils quivered so strangely. As if it was only now that the long-awaited moment were here, that moment of victory of whose coming he had spoken, I recollected, back in the brickyard. Indeed, for the very first time, I too was now seized, I don’t know why, by a certain sense of loss, even a touch of envy; for the first time, I now somewhat regretted that I was unable to pray, if only a few sentences, in the language of the Jews.

But neither stubbornness nor prayers nor any form of escape could have freed me from one thing: hunger. I had, naturally, felt — or at least supposed I felt — hunger before, back at home; I had felt hungry at the brickyard, on the train, at Auschwitz, even at Buchenwald, but I had never before had the sensation like this, protractedly, over a long haul, if I may put it that way. I was transformed into a hole, a void of some kind, and my every endeavor, every effort, was bent to stopping, filling, and silencing this bottomless, evermore clamorous void. I had eyes for that alone, my entire intellect could serve that alone, my every act was directed toward that; and if I did not gnaw on wood or iron or pebbles, it was only because those things could not be chewed and digested. But I did try with sand, for instance, and anytime I saw grass I would never hesitate; but then, sad to say, there was not much in the way of grass to be found, either in the factory or within the grounds of the camp. As much as two slices of bread was the asking price for just one small, pointy onion bulb, and the fortunate well-offs sold beets and turnips for the same price: I personally preferred the latter because they were juicier and usually larger in volume, though those in the know consider there is more of value, in terms of contents and nutrients, in sugar beets; but then who’s going to be fussy, even though I find it harder to stomach their tough flesh and pungent taste. I would make do with, and even take a certain comfort from, the thought that at least others were eating. Our guards’ lunch was always brought into the factory after them, and I would not take my eyes off them. I have to say, though, that I derived little joy from this as they ate quickly, without even chewing, just bolted it down; I could see they had no idea what they were doing, really. There was another time when I was in a workshop Kommando, and here the workmen unpacked whatever they had brought from home; I recollect watching for a long time — quite possibly, I would have to admit, not entirely without a smidgeon of obscure hope — a yellow hand covered in big warts as it fished long green beans, one after another, out of a tall jar. But that warty hand (by then I had thoroughly familiarized myself with every single one of its warts, every foreseeable grip it might make) just kept on moving, plying the passage between jar and mouth. After a while, though, his back concealed even that from my gaze, since he turned away, which naturally I understood as being out of a sense of decency, though I would have liked to tell him to just take his time, just carry on, as for my own part I set great store on the spectacle alone: that too was better than nothing, in a manner of speaking. The first time I purchased the previous day’s potato peelings, a whole bowlful, it was from a Finn. He produced it very casually during the lunch break, and luckily Bandi Citrom was not with me in the Kommando to be able to raise any objections. He placed it in front of him, then dug out a tattered bit of paper, and from that some gritty salt, all very leisurely, at length, even picking up a pinch with the tips of his fingers and carrying that to his lips to taste, before calling over, just kind of casually: “For sale!” The price was normally two slices of bread or a dollop of margarine; he was asking for half of that evening’s soup. I tried to haggle, appealing to all sorts of things, even equality. At this, he shook his head, the way Finns do: “ Di bist nist ki yid, d’bist a shaygets. You no Jew.” “So why am I here, then?” I asked. “How I know that?” he shrugged. “Lousy Jew!” I retorted. “That won’t make me sell it any cheaper,” he replied. In the end, I bought it for the price he had asked, but I have no idea from where he materialized that evening at precisely the moment my soup was being dished out, nor how he had managed to get wind in advance that it was going to be noodle milk pudding for supper that day.

I would maintain that there are certain concepts which can be fully comprehended only in a concentration camp. A recurrent figure in the dumb storybooks of my childhood, for instance, was that of a certain “itinerant journeyman” or “outlaw” who in order to win the princess’s hand enters the king’s service, and gladly so, because that amounts to only seven days altogether. “But seven days with me means seven years to you,” the king tells him. Well, I can say exactly the same about the concentration camps. I would never have believed, for instance, that I could become a decrepit old man so quickly. Back home that takes time, fifty or sixty years at least; here three months was enough for my body to leave me washed up. I can safely say there is nothing more painful, nothing more disheartening than to track day after day, to record day after day, yet again how much of one has wasted away. Back home, while paying no great attention to it, I was generally in harmony with my body; I was fond of this bit of machinery, so to say. I recollect reading some exciting novel in our shaded parlor one summer afternoon, the palm of my hand meanwhile caressing with pleasing absentmindedness the golden-downed, pliantly smooth skin of my tautly muscular sunburned thigh. Now that same skin was drooping in loose folds, jaundiced and desiccated, covered in all kinds of boils, brown rings, cracks, fissures, pocks, and scales that itched uncomfortably, especially between my fingers. “Scabies,” Bandi Citrom diagnosed with a knowing nod of the head when I showed him. I could only wonder at the speed, the rampant pace, with which, day by day, the enveloping material, the elasticity, the flesh around my bones dwindled, atrophied, dissolved, and vanished somewhere. Every day there was something new to surprise me, some new blemish, some new unsightliness on this ever stranger, ever more foreign object that had once been my good friend: my body. I could no longer bear looking at it without a sense of being at war with myself, a species of abhorrence; for that reason alone, after a while, I no longer cared to strip off to have a wash, to say nothing of my antipathy to such superfluous exertions, to the cold, and then too, of course, to my footwear.

These devices, at least in my case, caused a great deal of vexation. In general I had little reason to be satisfied with the items of clothing with which I was equipped in the concentration camp; there was not much of the practicable, and a lot that was faulty about them, indeed they became direct sources of inconvenience; they failed to measure up at all, I can safely say. During spells of fine gray drizzle, for instance, which with the change of season were prolonged when they occurred, the burlap outfit was transformed into a stiff stovepipe, the clammy touch of which one’s skin strove to avoid in any way possible — quite in vain, naturally. A prison overcoat (these were issued, it has to be said in all fairness) was quite worthless here, just another handicap, yet another damp layer, and in my view no satisfactory solution was provided even by the coarse paper from a cement sack that Bandi Citrom, like many others, had filched for himself and wore under his jacket, in spite of all the risks, since this sort of transgression soon comes to light: it only takes the whack of a stick on the back and another on the chest for the rustling to make the offense manifest. On the other hand, if it no longer crackles, I ask you, then what is the use of the fresh annoyance of this soaking-wet pulp, which again can only be discarded?

The wooden shoes, though, are the most irksome. It all started with the mud, in actual fact. Even in this respect, I can tell you, the notions I had formed hitherto turned out to be inadequate. Naturally, I had already seen, even trampled in, mud back home, yet I still had no clue that mud can at times be the arena for the bulk of one’s cares, one’s very life. What it means to sink up to one’s calves in it, then put all one’s efforts into freeing one leg from it with a single, loudly squelching tug, only to plunge it in anew, no more than eight or twelve inches farther forward — in no way was I prepared, indeed it would have been pointless to be prepared, for all that. Now, one thing that has become clear about the clogs is that the heels wear down over time. When that happens, one has to go around on a thick sole that at a certain point suddenly thins and thus curves up in a gondola shape, requiring one to rock forward on the rounded sole like a sort of tumbler toy. On top of that, at the place where the former heel had been, a gap, widening day by day, opens up between the stiffer uppers and the extremely thin sole, so now cold mud, not to speak of tiny pebbles and sharp bits of debris of all kinds, can stream in unobstructedly at every step. Meanwhile those stiff uppers have long been chafing one’s ankles and abraded countless sores on the softer tissues below them. Now, those sores by their very nature suppurate, and that pus is definitely sticky, with the result that it becomes impossible to free oneself from the clogs: they become stuck to the feet, veritably fused to them, rather like new body parts as it were. I wore them during the day and also wore them on turning in to sleep, if only so as not to waste time when I got up, or to be more precise, jumped down from my bunk two, three, sometimes even four times during the night. That’s all very well at night: after a bit of bother, stumbling and slipping around in the mud outside, one somehow manages to find one’s way to the goal by the glare of the searchlights. But what is one supposed to do by day, exactly what, if the urge to empty one’s bowels seizes one— as it inevitably will — in the work detail? At a time like that, one plucks up every ounce of courage, bares one’s head, and begs the guard’s permission: “Gehorsamst, zum Abort”[22]— assuming, of course, there is a privy nearby, and specifically a privy that the prisoners may make use of. But let us suppose they do exist — suppose one’s guard is well disposed and grants permission once, grants it a second time; but then — I ask you! — who is going to be so rash, so desperate, as to test that patience a third time? The only thing left at a time like that is mute turmoil, teeth clenched, bowels continually quaking, until the dice have rolled and either one’s body or one’s mind wins out.

As a final means, there are the beatings — whether expected or unexpected, sought or sedulously avoided — anywhere and at any time. I had my fair share of them too, naturally, no more but also no less than normal, the average, the ordinary, like anyone, any one of us — as many as are consistent with purely routine conditions in our camp rather than any particular personal accident. Inconsistent as it may be, I have to relate that I came in for these, not from an SS serviceman — someone who is in fact to some degree professionally called upon, authorized, even obliged in that respect — but from a yellow-overalled member of a more shadowy semimilitary “Todt” organization that, so I gather, has some sort of supervisory role over workplaces. He happened to be around and spotted it — Oh, what a yell! what a sprint! — when I dropped a bag of cement. Now, carrying cement must be welcomed by every Kommando — rightly so, in my opinion — with a peculiar joy that is accorded only on rare occasions and to which we would find it hard to admit, even privately among ourselves. You bow your head, someone lays a bag over your shoulder, you amble over to a truck with it, and there someone else picks it up, after which you amble back, taking a nice wide detour, the bounds of which are determined by the vagaries of the moment, and if you are lucky they will be queuing up in front of you, so you can snatch another breather until it’s your next turn. Then again, the bag itself weighs around twenty to thirty pounds altogether — child’s play compared with back home, one could even safely play ball with it, I reckon; but here I was, stumbling and dropping it. Worse still, the bag’s paper had burst and the contents spilled out, leaving a heap of the material, the treasure, the costly cement, powdering the ground. By then he was already on me, I had already felt his fist on my face, then, having been decked, his boot on my ribs and his grip on my neck as he pressed my face to the ground, in the cement, screaming insanely that I scrape it together, lick it up. He then hauled me to my feet, swearing he would teach me: “Dir werd ich’s zeigen, Arschloch, Scheisskerl, verfluchter Judehund,”[23]so I would never drop a bag again in the future. From then on, he personally loaded a new bag onto my shoulders each time it was my turn, bothering himself with me alone; I was his sole concern, it was me exclusively whom he kept his eye on, following me all the way to the truck and back, and whom he picked to go first even if, by rights, there were others still ahead of me in the queue. In the end, there was almost an understanding between us, we had got the measure of one another, and I noticed his face bore what was almost a smile of satisfaction, encouragement, even, dare I say, a pride of sorts, and from a certain perspective, I had to acknowledge, with good reason, for indeed, tottering, stooping though I might have been, my eyes seeing black spots, I did manage to hold out, coming and going, fetching and carrying, all without dropping a single further bag, and that, when it comes down to it, I would have to admit, proved him right. On the other hand, by the end of the day I felt that something within me had broken down irreparably; from then on, every morning I believed that would be the last morning I would get up; with every step I took, that I could not possibly take another; with every movement I made, that I would be incapable of making another; and yet for all that, for the time being, I still managed to accomplish it each and every time.