Prisoner B-3087 (7 page)

a few days later, my Job cleanInG the
ghetto ended, and I was put back to work in Plaszów.
Without Uncle Moshe, there was no one to help me get
a job outside the camp again.

The work was brutal, and the food too meager to
sustain me. Some mornings I could barely get myself
up out of my bunk, and I had a hard time standing at
roll call. Was this how it happened? Was this how a
prisoner slipped from being a person to a Muselmanner?

One night after a hard day’s work digging trenches
for new latrines, I collapsed to the floor of my barrack. I didn’t have the strength to climb into my bunk.
I was desperate to get up, but I couldn’t make my legs
obey me, couldn’t pull up my own weight with my
stick-and-straw arms. But if I didn’t get up soon, the
kapo
would come through, and he would beat me for
not being in my bunk.

No one bent to help me in my struggle to stand.
Everyone else was like me — they barely had energy
to spare for themselves, let alone anyone else.
Be no
one, care for no one. That’s how you survive.
That’s
what Uncle Moshe had taught me.

Moshe
, I thought, then, my chest aching,
why aren’t
you here? Why did you have to die? I need help. I need
a friend
.

I needed Moshe. He would have helped me back
up, despite his warning not to care. Who would help
me now?

I rolled myself onto my chest to push myself up, but
the board beneath me was loose. Wait — a loose board?
I knew the
kapo
would come any minute now. But
lying there on the floor, staring right at the board
made me remember building the new barracks across
the camp when I first arrived. There was always a
space, a small one, between the wooden floor and the
dirt below. If this board was loose enough —
The board pulled loose from the floor in my shaking hands. I glanced around to see if anyone had
noticed, but of course no one had. The other prisoners
were doing whatever they could to ignore me, just like
I ignored them.
The gap in the boards would be wide enough for me
to slide down inside, into the space between the floor
and the ground. I was tempted to pull the board all the
way up and roll down inside and disappear. But my
absence from my bunk would be noticed. And what
would I do, hide down there forever? I would be dead
even quicker without what little bread and soup they
gave us.
But tomorrow. Tomorrow after roll call, I could
disappear into the barracks instead of showing up for
my job. People were reassigned all the time. No would
know I was gone. I could sneak back and hide under
the floor!
It was like Moshe was helping me, even though he
wasn’t there. He had shown me the board. As I pushed
myself up off the floor with every gram of strength I
had left, I felt Moshe’s hand, helping me up. I reached
out and grabbed hold of the bunk, clawing my way
into my bed. I was not a Muselmann. Not yet.

The next morning after roll call, I grabbed the two
boys I knew in my barrack, Thomas and Isaac, and
showed them the board.

I don’t know why I showed them. Not when you
survived by looking out for yourself and only yourself. Maybe it was because I’d wanted someone to help
me when I had needed it. Maybe it was just that I
would be lonely in there all day. But maybe it was that
I just couldn’t keep the secret from someone else who
could use help too. I’d done that with the black-market
food Moshe had bought for us, and I’d felt guilty. I
didn’t want to hide out under the floor alone while
everyone else was worked to death.

“We can’t!” Thomas said immediately. “If we’re
caught, we’ll be killed!”
“We’ll die if we
don’t
hide here,” I told them. “Do
you want to go back out there and be worked to death?
Or worse, be killed by Goeth?”
“No! But this is begging for punishment.”
“This is survival,” I told them. I pulled up the
board the rest of the way. “There’s room inside for all
three of us.”
Isaac crawled down inside, and Thomas finally gave
in. At first all we did was sleep. We had been worked
so hard and fed so little all our bodies wanted to do
was hibernate, like bears. The ground was hard, but it
didn’t matter. So were the wooden pallets we called
beds. We slept, only waking long enough to poke one
another if we snored. The sound of footsteps on the
floor above woke us, and we knew it was time to come
out for roll call. We couldn’t miss a roll call, or they
would come looking for us. As prisoners began to
come back into the barracks, we pushed our way out,
hurriedly replacing the floorboard and sitting down
on my bunk like we had just come back from work.
Nobody ever suspected — or if they did, they didn’t
say anything. Talking got you killed.
The more we hid in under the floor, the stronger we
got. We weren’t healthy, not by a long shot, but without the heavy labor of the day, our bodies recovered a
little. I didn’t have any more trouble climbing back
into my bunk each night. And Thomas, Isaac, and I
started to sleep less during the day, staying awake to
whisper with one another. We talked about food,
mostly, but also our homes, and our families, until it
hurt too much to remember. Then we’d roll over and
sleep again, always listening for the soft step of prisoners’ feet on the floor above to let us know when to
come out.
But one day it wasn’t footsteps we heard; it was
voices. And in the middle of the day.
Isaac slithered over to look out the cracks in the
crawl-space wall. What he saw made him gasp.
“It’s Goeth!” he whispered. “Goeth and his dogs,
and two guards! And they’re heading for our barrack!”
“We’re dead,” Thomas said. “Those dogs will smell
us right away. They’ll find us, and we’ll be shot.”
The tight little crawl space under the floorboards
suddenly felt like a coffin, like I was already dead and
buried. My refuge from the nightmare of Plaszów was
now a trap. It was all I could do not to burst out of it
screaming.
“Yanek, what do we do?” Isaac asked, his voice
tight with the same desperation I felt.
I looked out through the cracks. Goeth was coming
closer, all shining black leather boots and crisp black
uniform. One of his dogs lifted its ears and looked
right at me.
I pulled back, away from the wall. “We’re trapped.
We have to get out of here.
We have to get out of here.
”
I was almost choking on my own fear.
“And go where?” Thomas hissed. “If we leave,
they’ll find us in the barrack!”
“I don’t care. We can’t be caught here.” I twisted
and squirmed until I was on my back. If I could just
lift that board, see the light from the room, breathe the
air. It was so tight down here. So close. Closing in —
Isaac grabbed my hand. “Yanek, we can’t
.
”
“We have to!” I had to get out of this coffin.
“We’ll . . . we’ll pretend we’re on a work detail.”
“He’ll kill us! Goeth will kill us!” Thomas said.
“Either he’ll kill us, or he won’t,” I told him. “But I
know one thing— if he finds us hiding down here,
he’ll kill us for sure!”
I pushed my way up and out of the crawl space. It
felt like coming up for air after being underwater. I
was free of my little coffin! I gasped, filling my lungs.
But if I didn’t really want to die, I had to move fast.
We all did. I helped Isaac out, then Thomas, and we
put the board back as quickly and quietly as we could.
My heart was thumping, but it made me feel alive, and
feeling alive made me want to
stay
alive.
The only way we were going to get out of this was
to make Goeth believe we were on a work detail, and
he could smell fear as well as his dogs could. Maybe
even better.
I dragged Isaac and Thomas to the door with me.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll do the talking.”
We left the barrack right as Goeth and his dogs
turned the corner.
“You there! Stop!” Goeth shouted. “Where are you
going?”
My hands shook as I doffed my cap like we were
drilled to do. “We were sent to a work detail on the
south side of camp, sir!” I shouted, my voice breaking
I was trembling so badly.
Goeth’s dogs stared at us, panting. Their ears
pricked up, like they were just waiting for Goeth to
tell them to attack us. Could they smell my fear? Did
the dogs know I was lying?
I stood my ground and tried not to shake. I was
deathly afraid, but everyone was afraid when they met
Goeth, whether they’d been hiding or not.
Goeth glared at us for a long moment, then walked
by without saying another word. Isaac and Thomas
and I stood rooted to the spot, afraid to say or do anything that would make Goeth reconsider. When he
was a few steps gone I realized that not moving
was
the wrong thing, and I grabbed my friends and pulled
them along again. “Let’s go,” I whispered, and we hurried around the corner.
We didn’t stop when Goeth was out of sight, but I
could finally breathe. In trying to survive, I’d come
closer than I’d ever been to dying.
I would never hide under the floorboards again.