Survival in Auschwitz

6. The Work

Before Resnyk came, I slept with a Pole whose name no one knew; he was gentle and silent, With two old sores on his shin-bones, and during the night gave out a squalid smell of illness; he also had a weak bladder, and so woke up and woke me up eight or ten times a night.

One night he left his gloves in my care and entered the hospital. For half an hour I hoped that the quartermaster would forget that I was the sole occupant of my bunk, but when the curfew bell had already sounded, the bed trembled and a long, red-haired fellow, with the number of the French of Drancy, climbed up beside me.

To have a bed companion of tall stature is a misfortune and means losing hours of sleep; I always have tall companions as I am small and two tall ones cannot sleep together. But it could at once be seen that Resnyk, despite everything, was not a bad companion. He spoke little and courteously, he was clean, he did not snore, did not get up more than two or three times a night and always with great delicacy. In the morning he offered to make the bed (this is a complicated and difficult operation, and also carries a notable responsibility, as those who remake the bed badly, the ‘schlechte Bettenbauer’, are diligently punished) and did it quickly and well; so that I experienced a certain fleeting pleasure later in the roll-call square on seeing that he had been assigned to my Kommando.

On the march to work, limping in our large wooden shoes on the icy snow, we exchanged a few words, and I found out that Resnyk is Polish; he lived twenty years at Paris but speaks an incredible French. He is thirty, but like all of us, could be taken for seventeen or fifty. He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, disturbing necessity. We tell them to each other in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, the Ukraine, and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible. But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?

When we arrived at the yard they took us to the Eisenröhreplatz, which is the levelling where they unload the iron pipes, and then the normal things of every day began. The Kapo made a second roll-call, briefly made note of the new acquisition and arranged with the civilian Meister about the day’s work. He then entrusted us to the Vorarbeiter and went to sleep in the tool cabin, next to the stove; he is not a Kapo who makes trouble, for he is not a Jew and so has no fear of losing his post. The Vorarbeiter distributed the iron levers among us and the jacks among his friends. The usual little struggle took place to get the lightest levers, and today it went badly for me: mine is the twisted one which weighs perhaps thirty-five pounds; I know that even if I had to use it without any weight on it, I would be dead of exhaustion in half an hour.

Then we left, each with his own lever, limping in the melting snow. At every step a little snow and mud stuck to the wooden soles of our shoes, until one walked unsteadily on two heavy, formless masses of which it was impossible to free oneself; then, when one suddenly came unstuck, it felt as if one leg was a hand shorter than the other.

Today we have to unload an enormous, cast-iron cylinder from the wagon: I think it is a synthesis tube and will weigh several tons. This is better for us, as it is notoriously less exhausting to work with big loads than with small ones; in fact, the work is better subdivided, and we are given adequate tools. However, it is dangerous, one dare not let one’s attention wander, a moment’s oversight is sufficient to find oneself crushed.

Meister Nogalla, the Polish superintendent, rigid, serious and taciturn, supervised in person the unloading operation. Now the cylinder lies on the ground and Meister Nogalla says: ‘Bohlen holen.’

Our hearts sink. It means ‘carry the sleepers’ in order to build the path in the soft mud on which the cylinder will be pushed by lever into the factory. But the wooden sleepers are mortized in the ground and weigh about 175 pounds; they are more or less at the limits of our strength. The more robust of us, working in pairs, are able to carry sleepers for a few hours; for me it is a torture, the load maims my shoulder-bone. After the first journey I am deaf and almost blind from the effort, and I would stoop to any baseness to avoid the second journey.

I will try and place myself with Resnyk; he seems a good worker and being taller will support the greater part of the weight. I know that it is in the natural order of events that Resnyk refuse me with disdain and form a pair with another more robust individual; then I will ask to go to the latrine and I will remain there as long as possible, and afterwards I will try to hide, with the certainty of being immediately traced, mocked at and hit; but anything is better than this work.

Instead Resnyk accepts, and even more, lifts up the sleeper by himself and rests it on my right shoulder with care; then he lifts up the other end, stoops to place it on his left shoulder and we leave.

The sleeper is coated with snow and mud; at every step it knocks against my ear and the snow slides down my neck. After fifty steps I am at the limit of what a person is theoretically able to support: my knees bend, my shoulder aches as if pressed in a vice, my equilibrium is in danger. At every step I feel my shoes sucked away by the greedy mud, by this omnipresent Polish mud whose monotonous horror fills our days.

I bite deeply into my lips; we know well that to gain a small, extraneous pain serves as a stimulant to mobilize our last reserves of energy. The Kapos also know it: some of them beat us from pure bestiality and violence, but others beat us when we are under a load almost lovingly, accompanying the blows with exhortations, as cart-drivers do with willing horses.

When we reach the cylinder we unload the sleeper on the ground and I remain stiff, with empty eyes, open mouth and hanging arms, sunk in the ephemeral and negative ecstasy of the cessation of pain. In a twilight of exhaustion I wait for the push which will force me to begin work again, and I try to take advantage of every second of waiting to recuperate some energy.

But the push never comes: Resnyk touches my elbow, we return as slowly as possible to the sleepers. There the others are wandering around in pairs, all trying to delay as long as possible before submitting to the load.

‘Allons, petit, attrape.’ This sleeper is dry and a little lighter, but at the end of the second journey I go to the Vorarbeiter and ask to go the latrine.

We have the advantage that our latrine is rather far; this permits us, once a day, a slightly longer absence than normal. Moreover, as it is also forbidden to go there alone, Wachsmann, the weakest and most clumsy of the Kommando, has been invested with the duty of Scheissbegleiter, ‘toilet companion’; by the virtue of this appointment, Wachsmann is responsible for any hypothetical (laughable hypothesis!) attempt to escape, and more realistically, for every delay.

As my request was accepted, I leave in the mud and the grey snow among the scraps of metal, escorted by the small Wachsmann. I never manage to reach an understanding with him, as we have no language in common; but his comrades tell me that he is a rabbi, in fact a Melamed, a person learned in the Torah, and even more, in his own village in Galicia, was famed as a healer and a thaumaturge. Nor am I far from believing it when I think that this thin, fragile and soft figure has managed to work for two years without falling ill and without dying, but on the contrary is lit up by an amazing vitality in actions and words and spends long evenings discussing Talmudic questions incomprehensibly in Yiddish and Hebrew with Mendi, who is a modernist rabbi.

The latrine is an oasis of peace. It is a provisional latrine which the Germans have not yet provided with the customary wooden partitions to separate the various divisions: ‘Nur für Engländer’, ‘Nur für Polen’, ‘Nur für Ukrainische Frauen’, and so on, with, a little apart ‘Nur für Häftlinge’. Inside, shoulder by shoulder, sit four hollow-faced Häftlinge; a bearded old Russian worker with the blue stripe OST on his left arm; a Polish boy, with a large white P on his back and chest; an English POW, with his face splendidly shaven and rosy and his khaki uniform neat, ironed and clean, except for a large KG (Kriegsgefangener) on his back. A fifth Häftling stands at the door patiently and monotonously asking every civilian who enters loosening his belt: ‘Êtes-vous français?’

When I return to work the lorries with the rations can be seen passing, which means it is ten o’clock. It is already a respectable hour, as the midday pause can be almost glimpsed in the fog of the remote future, allowing us to derive a little more strength from the expectation.

I do another two or three trips with Resnyk, searching attentively, even going to distant piles, to find lighter sleepers, but by now all the best ones have already been carried and only the other ones remain, repellent, with sharp corners, heavy with mud and ice, with metal plates nailed in to fix the rails.

When Franz comes to call Wachsmann to go and claim the ration, it means that it is already eleven o’clock and the morning has almost finished — no one thinks about the afternoon. Then the corvée returns at 11.30, and the standard interrogation begins: how much soup today, what quality, if we were given it from the top or the bottom of the vat; I force myself not to ask these questions, but I cannot help listening eagerly to the replies, sniffing at the smoke carried by the wind from the kitchen.

And at last, like a celestial meteor, superhuman and impersonal like a sign from heaven, the midday siren explodes, granting a brief respite to our anonymous and concord tiredness and hunger. And the usual things happen again: we all run to the hut, and we queue up with our bowls ready and we all have an animal hurry to swell our bellies with the warm stew, but no one wants to be first, as the first person receives the most liquid ration. As usual, the Kapo mocks and insults us for our voracity and takes care not to stir the pot, as the bottom belongs notoriously to him. Then comes the bliss (positive, from the belly) of the distension and warmth of the stomach and of the cabin around the noisy stove. The smokers, with miserly and reverent gestures, roll a thin cigarette, while everybody’s clothes, humid with mud and snow, give out a dense smoke at the heat of the stove, with the smell of a kennel or of a sheepfold.

A tacit convention ordains that no one speak: within a minute everyone is sleeping, jammed elbow against elbow, falling suddenly forwards and recovering with a stiffening of the back. Behind the barely-closed eyelids, dreams break out violently, the usual dreams. To be at home, in a wonderfully hot bath. To be at home, seated at a table. To be at home, and tell the story of this hopeless work of ours, of this never-ending hunger, of the slave’s way of sleeping.

Then, in the bosom of the vapours of our torpid digestions, a painful nucleus condenses, and jars us and grows until it crosses the threshold of the consciousness and takes away the joy of sleep. ‘Es wird bald ein Uhr sein’: it is almost one o’clock. Like a rapid, voracious cancer, it kills our sleep and oppresses us with a foreboding anguish: we listen to the wind blowing outside, and to the light rustle of the snow against the window, ‘es wird schnell ein Uhr sein’. While everyone clings on to his sleep, so as not to allow it to abandon him, all senses are taut with the horror of the signal which is about to come, which is outside the door, which is here…

Here it is. A thud at the window: Meister Nogalla has thrown a snowball against the window pane, and now stands stiffly outside, holding his watch with its face turned towards us. The Kapo gets up, stretches himself, and says quietly as one who does not doubt that he will be obeyed: ‘Alles heraus’, all out.

Oh, if one could only cry! Oh, if one could only affront the wind as we once used to, on equal terms, and not as we do here, like cringing dogs.

We are outside and everyone picks up his lever. Resnyk drops his head between his shoulders, pulls his beret over his ears and lifts his face up to the low grey sky where the inexorable snow whirls around: ‘Si j’avey une chien, je ne le chasse pas dehors.’