Prisoner B-3087 (8 page)

one mornInG at roll call, I was one of fIfty
prisoners pulled out of the ranks and loaded onto a
truck. The Nazis didn’t tell us where we were going.

“They’re taking us away to kill us,” one of the
men said.
But that didn’t make any sense. Amon Goeth had
no problem killing any of us at Plaszów. Why bother
to load us into a truck and take us somewhere else to
kill us? Just looking around at the others the Nazis
had chosen, I could tell we were the strongest men at
Plaszów— or at least the furthest from becoming
Muselmanners. I was sure we were being taken somewhere else to work, and I was sure it had to be better
than Plaszów.
My two weeks saving my strength under the floor
of my barrack had saved me.
The truck pulled up outside a building with a tall
spire, like a bell tower, but this was no church. The
place had an industrial look to it; oil-covered motors
and generators stood around it like sentinels, and train
tracks led into it and out.
The Nazi in charge of our truck unloaded us, and
we joined another group of prisoners who’d been
brought in from somewhere else. I ended up standing
next to a man who looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t
place him.
“Are you from Kraków?” I asked him.
“No!” he said, with surprising force. “I am no one!”
He was right, of course. I shouldn’t even have asked.
But I noticed two of the other men who came with me
from Plaszów looking at him more intently now.
“First we will take you into the mine, to show you
where you will be working,” a
kapo
told us. “Then
you will be assigned to your barracks.”
We were marched into the factory, which wasn’t a
factory after all. It was the sheltered entrance to an
enormous mine. In groups of ten and twelve we
boarded elevators. I got on with the familiar-looking
man and the two prisoners from Plaszów who’d been
watching him. They stood close beside him now,
uncomfortably close, but he didn’t say anything. He
just stared at the floor.
The elevator
kachunk
ed, and down, down, down,
we went. Electric lights on the open elevator cage illuminated the gray-white walls of the mine shaft as we
descended. Suddenly I was reminded of being under
the floorboards again in Plaszów. I was squeezed in,
underground. Trapped, in the dark, with death coming for me. . . .
“Salt,” one of the others whispered. “The Wieliczka
salt mine. It has to be.”
My trance was broken. I reached out my hand to
touch the wall and tasted my fingers. It was true—
the walls were made of salt!
The elevator car hit bottom, and we were guided
through a labyrinth of tunnels and small chambers.
“You’ll be working room forty-seven,” our
kapo
told us. “Level seven.”
We marched down salt stairs, we crawled along salt
floors, we passed stalagmites formed from salt water
dripping off the ceiling. I had never seen anything like
it. The mine was like a strange dreamworld. Very soon
we left the electric lights behind and could only see as
far ahead of us as our
kapo
’s carbide headlamp.
“Maybe you’re thinking it would be easy to slip away
in the tunnels,” our
kapo
told us. “Maybe you are thinking it would be easy to escape into the darkness. There
are nine levels. Three hundred kilometers of tunnels.
Maybe you are thinking we would never find you.”
The
kapo
stopped and turned his headlamp on us.
“You’re right. We
wouldn’t
find you. You would be
lost forever in a maze blacker than night, with nothing
to eat but salt, and nothing to drink but salt water. If I
were you, I wouldn’t get lost — either on purpose, or
by accident.”
We all followed closer behind him the rest of the way.
The
kapo
showed us the room where we would be
working. The picks and shovels we would be using. The
carts we would fill with them. The other prisoners who
worked the mine were already back in their barracks,
asleep. We would get up with them before dawn and
come right back here to work, without a full night’s
sleep. Just the thought of it made my arms and legs ache.
The
kapo
took us out a different way, through a vast
chamber where every footstep echoed. One of the men
in front of me stumbled, and a piece of salt clattered
off the wooden boardwalk beneath us and splashed.
Water! There was an entire lake under here. It rippled and glimmered black in the light from the
kapo
’s lamp.
Up more steps we went, and another elevator, until
we came to another huge chamber, this one lit with
electric light again. Here there was no lake, but something even more amazing: statues! Dozens of figures,
all carved out of salt. And the lights in the ceiling —
they were chandeliers. Chandeliers made out of salt.
After so many months and years of dirty streets and
peeling paint, of gray uniforms and spartan barracks,
it was astounding that there could still be beauty in
the world. Especially here, a mile underground.
“The workers, the miners— they did this,” whispered the man who’d told me the name of the mine
before. “Some of these statues are a thousand years old.”
There were trolls and serpents and gnomes. There
were Polish knights and kings and queens. I wished
they could somehow, magically, come to life and free
us — save us.
They stayed still though, frozen in salt. As trapped
and helpless as we were.
The last room was another monument left by former miners in Wieliczka’s happier past. It was a temple,
a chapel — no, an underground cathedral. There were
more statues, an altar, a rail. Everything a Catholic
needed to hold services. But praying hadn’t done the
miners any good either. The Nazis owned almost
all of Poland now, even three hundred meters
underground.
Night had fallen and the stars were out when we got
back topside. We were taken to our barracks, which
were no better than our last at Plaszów. Because we’d
missed dinner we were sent to bed without any food.
We knew better than to complain, and most of us went
to our beds as quickly as we could. Morning, as we all
knew, would be there before any of us were ready
for it.
But the two men who’d been looking strangely at
the man I thought was familiar cornered him once the
kapo
was gone.
“Your name is Holtzman, isn’t it?” one of them said.
“No,” the familiar-looking man said. “No, my
name is Finkelstein!”
“You were in Kraków, weren’t you?” the other man
said. “You were one of the Judenrat’s policemen.”
Of course! That’s why I remembered him! How
could I have forgotten that face? He was the man who
had brought the Nazis to my flat, the one who had
stolen everything else from us while the Nazi took my
mother’s ring. I remembered my mother’s eyes that
day, the emptiness that had never completely gone
away. I’d been so scared, so protective, that I hadn’t
even felt anger.
I did now.
“No!” the policeman said. There was panic in his
eyes. “My name is Finkelstein! From Zielonki!”
“Quiet in there!” a
kapo
’s voice shouted from outside. The two men said nothing more to the policeman,
but they watched him all the way back to their bunks.
That night, I could hear the man crying softly in his
bed, until someone hissed at him to shut up.

The morning was cold, with only lukewarm, coffeeflavored water to fight off the chill. It was colder still
underground, where it was always damp and the sun
never shone. The low ceiling made us all walk like old
crones, and I noticed that even when they could, some
of the old-timers never stood up straight anymore.
Their backs were permanently bent.

I was given my own carbide light, my own pickax,
and my own place to work. It was heavy work, and
boring; there was nothing to it but swinging my pickax
again and again, breaking off big chunks of salt that
another prisoner shoveled into a donkey cart. I chipped
away, my arms already starting to ache from weakness
and malnutrition, when I heard someone cry out from
the chamber around the corner from mine.

“What’s this? How did this happen? Who’s
done this?”
It was the voice of one of the
kapo
s. It wasn’t said in
the tone the
kapo
s used to taunt us or goad us into
working harder. This was something different.
Something confused. Something scared. The other
kapo
s heard it in his voice right away and ran around
the corner to help. Without guards, we put down our
picks and our shovels and hurried to peek around the
corner behind them.
It was the Judenrat policeman. Holtzman or
Finkelstein or whatever his name was. His head had
been smashed in with a shovel, and the rest of his body
was gashed and torn and bleeding. In the carbide light
from a dozen watching headlamps, something glittered and shone in his cuts.
Salt
. Someone had rubbed salt in all his wounds.
Like Abimelech, in the book of Judges, who sowed the
fields of his own people with salt after he put down
their rebellion. I remembered reading about him
while studying the Torah with my father, long before
the war.
This was punishment and purification, all in one.
“I said I want to know who did this!” the
kapo
yelled.
I looked around from face to face, trying to see who
had done it. The men who had accused him in the barracks weren’t there. It could have been any of them. It
could have been all of them.
No one said anything, and I worried we would all
be whipped for the crime. But the
kapo
only shook
his head.
“What do I care if you kill one another? You’ll all
be dead soon enough anyhow. You. And you,” he said,
pointing to two of the prisoners watching nearby.
“Drag his body out of here, weight him down, and
dump him in the underground lake.”
No one said another word about him. The
kapo
s
sent us back to our places, and I chipped away at the
salt wall again until they told me to stop.
That night, I dreamed the salt statues came to life
and set on our captors with their swords, but every
one of the statues had the face of the dead man.