Survival in Auschwitz

14. Kraus

When it rains we would like to cry. It is November, it has been raining for ten days now and the ground is like the bottom of a swamp. Everything made of wood gives out a smell of mushrooms.

If I could walk ten steps to the left I would be under shelter in the shed; a sack to cover my shoulders would be sufficient, or even the prospect of a fire where I could dry myself; or even a dry rag to put between my shirt and my back. Between one movement of the shovel and another I think about it, and I really believe that to have a dry rag would be positive happiness.

By now it would be impossible to be wetter; I will just have to pay attention to move as little as possible, and above all not to make new movements, to prevent some other part of my skin coming into unnecessary contact with my soaking, icy clothes.

It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium — as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom — well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.

We have been stuck in the mud since the morning, legs akimbo, with our feet sinking ever deeper in the selfsame holes in the glutinous soil. We sway on our haunches at every swing of the shovel. I am half-way down the pit, Kraus and Clausner are at the bottom, Gounan is above me at surface level. Only Gounan can look around, and every now and again he warns Kraus curtly of the need to quicken the pace or even to rest, according to who is passing by in the road. Clausner uses the pickaxe, Kraus lifts the earth up to me on his shovel, and I gradually pass it up to Gounan who piles it up on one side. Others form a shuttle service with wheelbarrows and carry the earth somewhere, of no interest to us. Our world today is this hole of mud.

Kraus misses his stroke, a lump of mud flies up and splatters over my knees. It is not the first time it has happened, I warn him to be careful, but without much hope: he is Hungarian, he understands German badly and does not know a word of French. He is tall and thin, wears glasses and has a curious, small, twisted face; when he laughs he looks like a child, and he often laughs. He works too much and too vigorously: he has not yet learnt our underground art of economizing on everything, on breath, movements, even thoughts. He does not yet know that it is better to be beaten, because one does not normally die of blows, but one does of exhaustion, and badly, and when one grows aware of it, it is already too late. He still thinks… oh no, poor Kraus, his is not reasoning, it is only the stupid honesty of a small employee, he brought it along with him, and he seems to think that his present situation is like outside, where it is honest and logical to work, as well as being of advantage, because according to what everyone says, the more one works the more one earns and eats.

‘Regardez-moi ça!… Pas si vite, idiot!’ Gounan swears at him from above; then he remembers to translate it in German: ‘Langsam, du blöder Einer, langsam, verstanden?’ Kraus can kill himself through exhaustion if he wants to, but not today, because we are working in a chain and the rhythm of the work is set by him.

There goes the siren of the Carbide factory, now the English prisoners are leaving; it is half past four. Then the Ukrainian girls will leave and it will be five o’clock and we will be able to straighten our backs, and only the return march, the roll-call and the lice-control will separate us from our rest.

It is assembly time, ‘Antreten’ from all sides; from all sides the mud puppets creep out, stretch their cramped limbs, carry the tools back to the huts. We extract our feet from the ditch cautiously so as not to let our shoes be sucked off, and leave, dripping and swaying, to line up for the return march. ‘Zu dreine’, in threes. I tried to place myself near to Alberto as we had worked separately today and we both wanted to ask each other how it had gone; but someone hit me in the stomach and I finished behind him, right next to Kraus.

Now we leave. The Kapo marks time in a hard voice: ‘Links, links, links’; at first, our feet hurt, then we slowly grow warm and our nerves relax. We have bored our way through all the minutes of the day, this very day which seemed invincible and eternal this morning; now it lies dead and is immediately forgotten; already it is no longer a day, it has left no trace in anybody’s memory. We know that tomorrow will be like today: perhaps it will rain a little more or a litde less, or perhaps instead of digging soil we will go and unload bricks at the Carbide factory. Or the war might even finish tomorrow, or we might all be killed or transferred to another camp, or one of those great changes might take place which, ever since the Lager has been the Lager, have been infatigably foretold as imminent and certain. But who can seriously think about tomorrow?

Memory is a curious instrument: ever since I have been in the camp, two lines written by a friend of mine a long time ago have been running through my mind:

It is like that here. Do you know how one says ‘never’ in camp slang? ‘Morgen früh’, tomorrow morning. It is now the hour of ‘links, links, links und links’, the hour in which one must not lose step. Kraus is clumsy, he has already been kicked by the Kapo because he is incapable of walking in line: and now he is beginning to gesticulate and chew a miserable German, listen, listen, he wants to apologise for the spadeful of mud, he has not yet understood where we are, I must say Hungarians are really a most singular people.

To keep step and carry on a complicated conversation in German is too much. This time it is I who warn him that he has lost step; I look at him and I see his eyes behind the drops of water on his glasses, and they are the eyes of the man Kraus.

Then an important thing happened, and it is worth telling now, perhaps for the same reason that it happened then. I began to make a long speech to Kraus: in bad German, but slowly, separating the words, making sure after each sentence that he had understood.

I told him that I had dreamt that I was at home, the home where I was born, with my family, sitting with my legs under the table, and on the table a great deal, a very great deal to eat. And it was summer and it was in Italy — at Naples?… yes, at Naples, this is hardly the time to quibble. Then all of a sudden the bell rang, and I got up hurriedly and went to open the door, and who did I see? I saw him, this very Kraus Páli, with hair grown, clean and well nourished and dressed as a free man, with a loaf of bread in his hand. Yes, a loaf of four pounds, still warm. Then ‘Servus, Páli, wie geht’s?’ and I felt filled with joy and made him come in, and I explained to my parents who he was, and that he had come from Budapest, and why he was so wet; because he was soaking, just like now. And I gave him food and drink and a good bed to sleep in, and it was nighttime, but there was a wonderful warmth so that we were all dry in a moment (yes, I was also very wet).

What a good boy Kraus must have been as a civilian: he will not survive very long here, one can see it at the first glance, it is as logical as a theorem. I am sorry I do not know Hungarian, for his emotion has broken the dykes, and he is breaking out in a flood of outlandish Magyar words. I cannot understand anything except my name, but by the solemn gestures one would say that he is making promises and prophecies.

Poor silly Kraus. If he only knew that it is not true, that I have really dreamt nothing about him, that he is nothing to me except for a brief moment, nothing like everything is nothing down here, except the hunger inside and the cold and the rain around.