Prisoner B-3087 (15 page)

It was my stomach that woke me the next morning,
more than the light. My first thought was the boy’s
bread, but the rise and fall of the boy’s chest told me he
hadn’t died in the night. He was still alive! How was it
possible? And not only was he alive, but his breath
was much less shallow. There was color in his face
again too. The sleep had done what I promised him it
would — it had given him the rest he needed to face a
new day of marching.

I shook with anger and frustration. He was supposed
to die! I needed him to die, so I could have his bread.
I closed my eyes. What was I thinking? I wouldn’t
steal bread from a living boy, but I would wish death
on him so I could take it without guilt? What were
the camps doing to me? What had the Nazis turned
me into?
Faced with two evils — stealing from a living boy,
or wishing him dead to take his food guilt-free — I
realized I could more easily have the sin of stealing on
my conscience. I needed that bread to live, and I was
going to take it. The boy
owed
me, after all. He
was alive only because I had helped him.
Slowly, my hand shaking, I reached around the
nameless boy for the bread sticking out of his pocket.
I touched it. I had it in my fingers when the boy’s eyes
opened wide and he stirred.
“Hey! What are you doing?” he said.
I yanked my hand back. “Nothing! I was — I was
just trying to see if you were still alive.”
The boy pushed the bread farther down into his
pocket. “Well, I am,” the boy told me. He pushed
himself to his feet.
“Wait,” I said. “I’m the one who helped you yesterday—” I started to say, but without so much as a
thank-you the boy staggered away to join the march.
I would have cried again, but I was too tired. A
kapo
came around, kicking the last of us still on the ground,
and I picked myself up. I wasn’t a Muselmann. I might
be starving, and I might be that nameless boy the others saw staggering through the ranks by midday, but I
wasn’t dead yet. My name was still Yanek, and I was
going to survive.

three days later, I staGGered throuGh the
gates of Sachsenhausen. I barely knew where I was, or
who I was. All I remembered of the last three days was
an enormous radio tower in the distance, growing
larger and larger as we marched. “That’s Berlin,”
someone had said. “That tower is in Berlin.” The tower
was in Berlin, but we weren’t; we were in Sachsenhausen,
and I was so tired and hungry that I didn’t care if
I lived or died. Death seemed like such a welcome
release.

If the Nazis had put us right to work, I might have
died that day. I might have curled up on the ground
like a Muselmann and never gotten up again. But they
sent us to our barracks instead, where they fed us soup
and bread. I was starving — I had been without food
for days now, with only snow to eat each morning
before we began to walk again — but all I wanted to
do was sleep. When would they let us lie down?

They wouldn’t let us get into our bunks yet, so I
sipped at the soup. It was nothing better than flavored
water, but it was warm. So blessedly warm! My dry
mouth tried to hang on to every last drop as I swallowed it down. The bread I couldn’t eat. Not yet. I
didn’t put it in the waist of my pants this time though.
I clung to it like it was a precious jewel, hoarding it
like a dragon.

At last they told us it was time to sleep, and I crawled
up into a single bed with five other men. There were so
many of us we couldn’t sleep on our backs, but I fell
asleep right away just the same. Just being out of the
cold felt like paradise.

It seemed I had just closed my eyes when morning
came and the
kapo
s roused us up out of our beds. In
the light of day, we could see the camp was filled with
corpses. Sometimes they lay alone, up against the wall
of a barrack, as though they had simply fallen asleep
there. Sometimes there were piles of them, built neatly
in rows of four, one level turned this way, the next
level turned that way, so they would stack evenly.
Sometimes the bodies looked like they had just been
tossed aside where they had died, in the middle of a
path, out behind the latrine. I had seen death many
times by now. I had seen men killed, and I had watched
men die of starvation and cold right in front of me. But
here in Sachsenhausen, death was so common, so
ordinary, that the dead were like fallen trees in the
forest — so unremarkable that they were only moved
when they got in the way.

Before roll call we would wash, the Nazis told us,
and they marched us out to some pumps. There were
no brushes, no soap, no towels, but I rinsed myself off
anyway. The water was freezing, but I was filthy from
the march. As I ran a wet finger across my teeth, a
memory suddenly came to me, unbidden. I remembered the first day my mother had brought me home a
toothbrush. I must have been no more than three or
four. The toothbrush was shiny and plastic and green.
That moment seemed like a million years ago. Had I
ever really owned something so amazing as a toothbrush? Had I ever really lived in a world with such
wondrous things in it? Even the simplest of possessions seemed like treasures now.

On the way to roll call, I ate what I could of last night’s
bread. I had clutched it throughout the night, and woke
to find myself still protecting it. The soup and sleep
and bread had done me good. I was no prize now, all
bones and skin and shaking hands, but I wasn’t so far
gone that I couldn’t work.

The Nazis lined us up for roll call near the front
gate, which had the words
Work Makes You Free
on it,
just like at Auschwitz. Our new masters didn’t seem
interested in making us work though. Not right away.
Instead we stood at attention, our feet sinking into the
freezing mud while they called our numbers. Again
and again they went through the roll call.

Sleet began to fall, and the Nazis left us standing in
the yard while they went inside to warm themselves
by the fire. They watched us from the windows, making sure none of us moved. We stood there for hours,
for no reason other than the delight of our captors.

One man wiped the wet sleet from his face, and the
Nazis saw him. They rushed outside and beat him,
then ordered him to give what they called the
Sachsenhausen salute. They forced him to squat with
his hands held out in front of him. If he moved in any
way, if his arms lowered, or his legs moved, or he fell
over on his side, the Nazis would kill him. And they
never let him up, either. It was torture. Everyone could
see that. Our legs were barely strong enough to hold
us up, let alone to squat for hours. Even a healthy person would fall over in time. The man’s legs began to
shake, and his arms started to quiver, but still he held
the salute. It was only later, when the Nazis had
resumed the roll call and we had all forgotten about
him, that the man finally fell over. The Nazis ran to
beat him, but he never felt it. He was unconscious.
Maybe even dead. I didn’t know. The guards dragged
him away, and I never saw him again.

Suddenly one of the prisoners near the end of the
line broke off and ran. The Nazis saw him right away
and yelled for the guards at the gate to catch him, but
he wasn’t headed for the gate. In a stumbling, broken
run, the prisoner threw himself on the high-voltage
electric barbed wire that lined the fence. His body
sparked and thrashed in the wires and bled as the
barbs cut him. Within seconds his body hung dead
and limp. The Nazis had to turn off the electric fence
to get him out. His shirt and pants were scorched from
the electricity, and his skin was black where the wires
had touched him. I couldn’t look, but at the same time
I couldn’t look away.

The Germans laughed as they threw his body down
in front of us for everyone to see.
“Would any other Jews like to throw themselves on
the fence?” they asked. “Go now! We won’t stop you!
We’ll be glad to be rid of you!”
No one else took them up on their offer.
After roll call we were finally put to work. I broke
rocks again in the quarry pit. Why the Germans
needed so much gravel I never understood, but I broke
big rocks into medium-sized rocks, and medium-sized
rocks into small rocks, and small rocks into gravel for
them —
pound, pound, pound, pound —
my hammer
getting heavier and heavier with each strike.
At lunch, a half a dozen other young men and I were
pulled away from our scant meals of watery soup and
hard bread. We looked at one another nervously. Was
this it? Were we all going to be lined up along a trench
and shot? I fought down waves of terror as I walked.
Had I survived the death march and gotten my
strength back, such as it was, all so I could die in a
muddy ditch? I didn’t want to die. Not after surviving
so long. Not after coming so far. I scanned the camp as
we walked, watching for where they were taking us. If
it was a death pit, what would I do? Run? Turn and
fight? Yell and scream? Or would I let them shoot me
without fighting back, so that no one else would have
to suffer because of me?
But it wasn’t a ditch the Nazis took us to. It was the
soldiers’ mess hall. I was even more confused. Were
they going to feed us? In the soldiers’ canteen?
No. It was a trick, of course. All part of the Nazis’
game. And in Sachsenhausen, they played the game
with relish. The other boys and I were lined up in
front of the soldiers’ tables, and we were told to sing.
For an hour we were their choir, our weak, raspy
voices serenading them as they laughed and talked and
ate— and the food they ate! Big, heaping plates of
meat and potatoes and gravy, and steaming black coffee. I tried to look away so my stomach wouldn’t
rumble, but just the smell of it made my mouth water.
They weren’t going to feed us any of it, of course.
When they were finished eating we were sent back to
our barracks, where we found no food left for us.
That afternoon, they put me to work chopping firewood to heat the soldiers’ quarters.
Chop, chop, chop,
chop.
Every swing meant survival, I told myself.
Work
to live. Live until the Allies come.
There were planes
overhead here too, and the rumbles of explosions in
the distance. Berlin was under attack. The war had
come to Germany. But would the war end before the
Nazis killed me?
That night at roll call the Sachsenhausen guards
wanted entertainment, so they had a boxing tournament. They made some of the prisoners be the boxers
and forced the rest of us to watch.