Alexander Altmann A10567 (3 page)

He looked from the men standing beside him in soiled, ragged clothes to the guard, dressed in a uniform, a cigarette dangling from his lips. His pants were tucked into shiny, black boots and his brass-buttoned coat was cinched at the waist by a gleaming silver belt. Alexander narrowed his eyes and read the words embossed on the buckle
Gott mit uns
– God is with us. If God was with the Nazis, Alexander thought, then who was looking out for the Jews?

“A10567.” Alexander was the last to be called. He stepped forwards.

“You’ll do,” the block leader said, his lips pursed in a cynical smile. “You might even live to see the New Year,” he paused, “if you do as I say.” Alexander swallowed hard.

“You’ll join the Horse Platoon tomorrow. You four will replace the four men who were shot today.” The block leader waited so the words could sink in. “They were shot because the horses they were responsible for ate poison brambles.” The block leader laughed, a thin acidic laugh. “Don’t worry,” he said, “the horses are fine now.”

Alexander clenched his fists.
Just get through the day
, he breathed.
Get through today
.

A whistle sounded and a column of men approached the open door of the barrack. The guard stepped aside to let them pass. Alexander watched them file into the room and either drag themselves up the stairs or collapse onto a bunk, their faces glazed with sweat. He guessed there were around two hundred of them split between two floors and learned from eavesdropping on their conversations that they were tailors, machinists, doctors and welders. All of them worked in special units like the Corpse Squad whose job it was to collect the dead or the Clerical Detail who attended to the camp books. They had insect legs and shaved heads like the walking dead he’d left behind in Birkenau, but hope flickered in their red-rimmed eyes. Alexander could see that although they were worn-out and hungry, they hadn’t lost the will to live.

The block leader pointed to four bunks. “They’re yours,” he said to the new inmates, “and take these.” He handed each of the men a clean cup. Alexander looped it onto his belt next to his rusted bowl and took the bunk on the middle tier, three from the end. A prisoner wearing faded pants and a crumpled coat with a purple triangle stitched onto the left breast lay on the bunk below his. His face was gaunt – a skeleton’s face – and dangling from his veined hand was a silver cross. Alexander had heard that the clergy wore purple triangles but this was the first purple triangle he’d seen.

Another whistle sounded and the men who had filed into the barrack began to undress. Alexander peeled off his shirt and pulled off his boots and, tucking them under his arm, followed the men through a door to a bathroom, his eyes widening as he entered the room and saw, along one wall, a row of shower heads and along another, a bank of toilets. With seats.

He stuffed his bundle of clothes under a bench and stepped under a shower to relieve his stinging skin, tilting his head up to catch the murky water in his mouth. He found some soap on the floor to wash the acid smell from his body, but no matter how hard he scrubbed he couldn’t wash away the memory of his sister stepping from the cattle car.

He turned off the tap. Two men were leaning over a rusted basin, peering into the cracked glass that hung from the wall.

“You’ve got to shave every day.” One of the men scraped a switchblade across his stubbled cheek and turned to his friend. “Get your hands on a piece of glass before the next selection.” He splashed water onto his face. “Your scraped cheeks will have colour and you’ll look younger.” Alexander shuddered. He didn’t want to hop up and down on the spot or do star jumps to prove his fitness for work. He’d hoped he’d seen the last of the selections now that he was part of a special unit.

He pulled on his clothes and waited for supper, wondering if, like Bloody Mietek, the block leader would toss them scraps of food to fight over. He’d overheard the men talking about the block leader. They referred to him as the Rat, on account of his face, and Alexander thought it a fitting nickname. He scanned the room for someone lugging a soup tureen but instead saw men, clustered in groups, talking. Some sat on the floor, others lay on bunks. A few men huddled by the open door, smoking. The boy who’d snatched the guard’s cigarette stub stood in a corner, talking to a group of men. Alexander watched as the boy shook each of the men’s hands in turn, reaching into his pocket before the last man took his hand. Alexander craned his head and saw the boy pull the cigarette stub from his pocket and hand it to the man, before he took something in return, something withered and green. The stem of a pear, or a potato peel, maybe. Alexander rubbed his stomach and tried to soothe his hunger. The men next to him were trading chicken soup recipes and Alexander wanted to cry because, though the men filled their free hours talking about food, what they really meant was that they missed home. If they discussed barley soup and beans instead of their wives and daughters, if they focused on crumbed fish instead of their dead relatives, maybe they could pretend none of this was happening.

The cigarette stub boy crossed the room and stopped in front of Alexander. “We get bread for dinner – same as Birkenau – but cheese is a definite possibility.” The boy took his hands from his pockets and Alexander saw that he was holding an apple core.

“Want to split it?” The boy spoke quickly.

“What do you want in return?” Alexander narrowed his eyes. No one gave food away, not unless they wanted something in return.

“The name’s Isidor Finkler, but my friend’s call me Isi.” The boy extended his right hand.

Alexander didn’t shake it. He sighed. The boy wanted to be his friend. “No thanks,” he said. If he took the food, sooner or later the boy would ask a favour of him. He’d want Alexander to look after him when he was ill or cover for him when he snuck from the barrack. He’d expect Alexander to give him food and Alexander would have to do it.
If
they were friends.

“Suit yourself,” the boy said, biting into the apple and looking Alexander up and down. “How did you get into the men’s camp, anyway? You don’t look old enough.”

The SS doctor who’d stood on the arrival platform looking down at Alexander from the podium on his first day at Birkenau had said the same thing. Every time he saw Dr Mengele at a selection or a rollcall, Alexander was reminded of that horrible day, and now this freckled-face boy, with all his questions, had forced Alexander back there again, back to the very first selection.

It had been a Friday night. Alexander, Lili and their mother had been travelling for three days in the cramped cattle train. They weren’t fed or given water and, after the first day, Alexander’s mother had no food left in her bag to give them. Alexander had sat in the dark, knees drawn up to his face, watching the train tracks through the cracks in the floorboards. When he heard the cattle cars rumbling to a stop, he’d hoisted Lili onto his shoulders to peer through the small window above their heads.

“It’s awful,” she’d said. “There’s nothing but barbed wire and rows of ugly sheds.”

When the doors were flung open and Alexander jumped down, lifting his sister out after him, he saw that the place was worse than she’d described – much worse. They were told to line up in two columns: men and older boys in one column; women and children in the other. Alexander was fourteen. He stood next to his mother and took his sister’s hand.

SS officers pulled men from their wives and sons from their fathers.

“Go with the men,” his mother whispered, but Alexander shook his head. He’d promised his father he’d take care of them.

“Listen to your mother. Go with the men.” A man in a striped jacket and drawstring pants grabbed Alexander’s sleeve and shoved him towards the men. “Tell them you’re sixteen.”

Alexander shuffled forwards as the doctor stood on the podium in front of the men, pointing his baton to his left or right as each prisoner stopped before him.

“Alex!” A familiar voice. “It’s me, Mendel.” Alexander swung around to see his father’s friend standing behind him.

“Mendel!” Alexander began, but the farmer cut him off.

“Alex, listen to me. The SS are pulling boys from the men’s group before they get to the front of the line. Stand on my feet until we’re near the podium – you’ll look taller.” Alexander frowned. “It’s okay.” Mendel dragged his crooked left foot forwards and showed Alexander his heavy boot. “It won’t hurt.”

The line drifted along.

Mendel took Alexander’s hand and drew the boy close. “Your father was a good friend to me. After I got polio and stopped working he still delivered the milk to our house, every day. Never charged us a
pengo
. Let me do this for you … for him.” Alexander took Mendel’s hand and steadied himself on the man’s feet.

“You go first,” Mendel whispered, nudging Alexander ahead as they neared the podium.

“How old are you?” the doctor asked Alexander when it was his turn to be inspected. Mendel stood next to him, breathing heavily.

“Sixteen,” Alexander said, remembering to lie.

The doctor took a step forwards. “Sixteen?” He looked Alexander in the eye and all Alexander could think to do was run. He turned from the podium and without a backwards glance, ran past an open-mouthed Dr Mengele, his guards and their dogs, and he didn’t stop running, not until he was on the other side of the fence, buried in the crush of men selected to survive.

He’d waited for Mendel. Watched other men, at least ten men, file through the gate to join his group. He counted to one hundred and when his father’s friend still hadn’t come, he fought his way to the front of the group, and peering through the barbed wire, saw Mendel, limping to the left, dragging his crooked leg after him.

“How old am I?” Alexander shucked off the memories and looked into Isidor Finkler’s green eyes. “Old enough.”

Alexander was rich that night. The proud owner of half a loaf of bread and a stick of cheese. He meant to save some for the next day but he tore at the bread and devoured the cheese and, before he knew it, there was nothing left but the few crumbs that had fallen into his lap. He swept up the scraps and ate them too.

“So, where are you from?” Isidor swallowed the last of his bread and turned to Alexander. He would have answered the question – if only to shut the boy up – but Alexander didn’t know what to say. Where
was
he from? He couldn’t say Czechoslovakia, because when he was eight years old, his country was taken over by Hungary, and he couldn’t say Hungary, because four years later the Germans occupied Hungary and forced them out. He couldn’t even say the farm at six Gregor Lane, not after his family had been ordered to sign it over to one of his Aryan neighbours. He’d lost the house, the stables, his father’s cattle and the horses.

“I’m from Debrecen,” Isidor said, though Alexander hadn’t asked. “But I’m not going back. My father’s dead.”

Alexander looked away.

“Shot in the back of the head because he wouldn’t hand over the keys to our apartment.”

Alexander shook his head, then realised Isidor might misconstrue the gesture as sympathy.
I don’t want to know your story
, he thought.
I’ve heard a hundred others just like it and I don’t care.
Alexander wished he could say the words out loud, wished he was tough enough, mean enough, to tell the boy to shut up.

“My mother died in the ghetto,” Isidor continued, but Alexander cut him off.

“Talking about it doesn’t help,” he said, staring into the boy’s eyes. “Tomorrow is all that matters. Getting through the day and waking up tomorrow.”

The Rat turned out the lights and Alexander climbed onto his bunk, lifted the tip of his spoon to the bedhead and carved the number forty-three into the wood. Forty-three days since he’d stepped from the cattle train and walked through the gates of Birkenau. Forty-three days and counting.

“Tomorrow,” Isidor whispered, climbing up after Alexander and sinking into the straw mattress beside him. “Tomorrow will be a good day. Tomorrow we’ll ride horses.”

And despite himself, Alexander smiled. He thought of the long, dusty days ahead of him, the horses pressed close around him: brown-eyed chestnuts, blacks and roans. He’d rub them down, attend to their sores, feed them and groom them. On warm days he’d lead them out to graze and in winter, as the grass lost its flavour, he’d feed them hay and make warm straw beds for them. He wasn’t sure whether the Horse Platoon were allowed to ride the horses into the woods, but even if he were ordered to run circles around a paddock strung with barbed wire, he’d be happy.

Tomorrow he’d ride horses.

“
Alles raus!
”

Alexander opened his eyes and saw the Rat swing a hammer at a dented hubcap propped against the front door. The metallic clanging dragged the men from their dreams and one by one they opened their eyes and lifted their heads from their mattresses. Alexander swung his legs over the side of his bunk.

“
Aufstehen! Schnell! Schnell!
” The Rat dropped the hammer and started pulling men from their beds. Alexander yanked on his boots and leaped from his bunk. It was still dark, the night sky crammed with stars. He made his bed and darted across the hard concrete floor to the toilets.