Fatelessness (13 page)

It was then that we were obliged to pay attention—basically, more seriously than we had thus far—to the smell. I would find it difficult to pin down: sweetish and somehow cloying, with a whiff of the now familiar chemical in it as well, but altogether enough to almost make me fear the bread of a moment ago might be regurgitated. It was not hard to establish that the culprit was a chimney over to the left, in the direction of the metaled road but a fair way beyond that. It was a factory chimney, that was immediately apparent, and that is what people were also told by our superior; specifically a tannery chimney, as many had recognized straightaway. To be sure, it reminded me that on the occasional Sunday back then I had sometimes gone with my father to watch football matches in Újpest, and the streetcar had taken us past a leather works, where there too I had always had to hold my nose on that stretch of the route. For all that, the rumor went, we would not, fortunately, be working in that factory; all being well, and providing there was no outbreak of typhus, dysentery, or other infection among us, we would soon be moving off for another—and, we were assured, friendlier—place. That was also why until then we would not be carrying a number on our jacket and on our skin in particular, like our superior, or “block chief,” as they were now calling him. Many had seen this number for themselves: it was inscribed in light green ink, so the rumor went, on his forearm, indelibly stained or tattooed into the skin with pricks of a specially designed needle. It was at roughly the same time that a conversation between the volunteers who had brought the soup also reached my ears. They too had seen the numbers, likewise imprinted in the skin of the older prisoners in the kitchens. One response above all that did the rounds from mouth to mouth, its significance being furiously probed and repeated around me, was what one of those prisoners had said in reply to an inquiry from one of our own people as to what it was: “
Himmlische Telephonnummer
”—“a celestial telephone number,” the prisoner was alleged to have said. I could see the matter was giving everyone a lot of food for thought, and although I could not make much of it, I too found the phrase unquestionably odd. Anyway, that is when people started scrambling around the block chief and his two assistants, coming and going, interrogating them, veritably besieging them with questions, and hastily exchanging information with one another— for instance, about whether there was an epidemic raging. “There is,” was the word on that. What happens to the patients then? “They die.” And the dead? “They’re burned,” we learned. In truth, it slowly became clear that the chimney stack over the way, though I did not catch precisely how, was not actually a tannery but the chimney of a “crematorium,” a place where corpses are reduced to ashes, as we were told the word meant. I certainly took a harder look at it after that. It was a squat, square, widemouthed stack that looked as if it had been brusquely chopped off at its top. I can only say that I did not sense much else than a certain respect—apart from the stench, naturally, in which we were well and truly mired as in some fetid swamp. But then in the distance too, to our repeated astonishment, we were able to make out one more, then another, and again, right on the very horizon of the bright sky, yet another identical stack, two of which were right at that moment billowing out smoke similar to ours, and maybe people were also right to become suspicious of a puff of smoke from behind some sort of sparsely wooded park, and for the question to form in their minds, again rightly in my opinion, as to whether the outbreak could really be such as to produce so many dead.

I can state that even before dusk fell on that first day I fully understood just about everything, by and large. True, in the meantime we had also paid a visit to the latrine barracks, a place that comprised three sort of raised platforms along its entire length in each of which were two holes, so six altogether, over or into which one had to perch or aim, depending on what business one had. Little time was allowed, that’s for sure, as an appearance was soon made by an angry prisoner, this one with a black armband and what looked like a hefty club in his hand, and everyone had to make it scarce just as they were. A couple of other longtime prisoners were also still loitering around; they were more docile, though, even obliging enough to offer a few bits of information. Following the block chief’s directions, we had a considerable trek there and back, the path taking us by an interesting settlement: there were the usual barns behind the barbed-wire fence and between them these strange women (I promptly turned away from one, since dangling out of her unbuttoned dress right at that moment was something to which a bald-headed infant, its cranium glistening in the sun, was tenaciously clinging) and even stranger men in clothes that, threadbare as they were in general, were in the end nevertheless like those worn by people outside, in the free world so to say. By the time we were on the way back, though, I was clear that this was the Gypsies’ camp. I was a bit surprised, since although, guarded as almost everyone back home, myself included, was in their opinion of Gypsies, naturally enough, up till now I had never heard it said that they were actually criminals. Right then a cart arrived on their side of the fence, drawn by small children with harnesses on their shoulders, just like ponies, while alongside them walked a man with a big moustache and a whip in his hand. The load was covered with blankets but there was no mistaking the bread, white loaves at that, peeping through the many gaps and the rags, from which I concluded that they must have a higher status than us after all. Another sight from that walk also stuck in my mind: coming the other way along the path was a man in a white jacket, white trousers with a broad red stripe down the sides, and a black artist’s cap of the kind painters used to wear in the Middle Ages, a stout gentleman’s walking stick in his hand, constantly looking to both sides as he went, and I found it very hard indeed to believe that this distinguished person was, as it was asserted, merely a prisoner, the same as us.

I would be prepared to swear that I didn’t exchange a word with any stranger on the walk, yet it was to this that I can truly ascribe my more precise grasp of the facts. There across the way, at that very moment, fellow passengers from our train were burning—all those who had asked to be taken by car, or who up in front of the doctor had proved unfit due to old age or other reasons, along with little ones and the mothers who were with them and expectant women, so it was said. They too had proceeded from the station to the baths. They too had been informed about the hooks, the numbers, and the washing procedure, just the same as us. The barbers were also there, so it was alleged, and the bars of soap were handed out in just the same way. Then they too had entered the bathroom itself, with the same pipes and showerheads, so I heard, only out of these came, not water, but gas. This did not come to my notice all in one go but piecemeal, each time bringing further details, some disputed, others allowed to stand and added to. All along, I hear, everyone is very civil toward them, swaddling them with solicitude and loving-kindness, and the children play football and sing, while the place where they are suffocated to death lies in a very picturesque area, with lawns, groves of trees, and flower beds, which is why, in the end, it all somehow roused in me a sense of certain jokes, a kind of student prank. Adding to this, if I thought about it, was the crafty way in which, for instance, they had induced me to change clothes simply with the ruse of the hook and the number on it, or had frightened people carrying valuables with the X-rays, for example, which in the end had been no more than empty words. Of course, I was well aware that it was not altogether a joke, looked at from another angle, as I was in a position to convince myself of the outcome, if I may put it that way, with my own eyes and, above all, my increasingly queasy stomach; nevertheless that was my impression, and fundamentally—or at least so I imagined—that must have been pretty much the way it happened. After all, people would have had to meet to discuss this, put their heads together so to say, even if they were not exactly students but mature adults, quite possibly—indeed, in all likelihood—gentlemen in imposing suits, decorations on their chests, cigars in their mouths, presumably all in high command, who were not to be disturbed right then— that is how I imagined it. One of them comes up with the gas, another immediately follows with the bathhouse, a third with the soap, then a fourth adds the flower beds, and so on. Some of the ideas may have provoked more prolonged discussion and amendment, whereas others would have been immediately hailed with delight, the men jumping up (I don’t know why, but I insisted on their jumping up) and slapping one another’s palms—this was all too readily imaginable, at least as far as I was concerned. By dint of many zealous hands and much to-ing and fro-ing, the commanders’ fantasy then becomes reality, and as I had witnessed, there was no room for any doubt about the stunt’s success. Doubtless that is how they had all proceeded from the railway station: the old lady dutifully following her son’s wishes, the little boy with the white shoes and his blonde mother, the stout matron, the old gentleman in the black hat, or the nervous case up in front of the doctor. The “Expert” also crossed my mind: he would most likely have been utterly amazed, I suppose, the poor man. “Rosie” himself said “Poor old Moskovics” with a commiserating shake of the head, and we were all with him on that. Even “Fancyman” let out a cry of “Sweet Jesus!” for, as we were able to worm out of him, the boys’ hunch had been correct: he and that girl at the brickyard had indeed “gone all the way,” and he was now thinking of the possible consequences of that act which might show on her body over time. We recognized that the concern was justified, yet all the same, beyond anxiety, it was as if some other, less readily definable emotion were reflected in his face, and the boys themselves looked on him right then with a certain measure of respect, which I didn’t find so very difficult to understand, naturally.

Another thing that somewhat set me thinking that day was the fact that, as I was informed, this place, this institution, had already been in existence for years, standing here and operating exactly the same way, day after day, but nevertheless, as it were—and I admit this notion may, perhaps, contain a certain element of exaggeration—ready and waiting for me. In any event, our own block chief—more than a few people referred to this with distinct, one could say awe-struck, admiration—had already been living here for four years. It occurred to me that that had been a year of particular significance for me, being when I enrolled at the grammar school. The occasion of the opening ceremony for the school year was still lodged firmly in my memory: I too was there in a dark blue, braided, Hungarian-style uniform, a so-called “Bocskai” suit. Even the headmaster’s words had registered, he himself being a man of distinguished and, now I think back on it, somewhat commanding presence, with severe eyeglasses and a majestic white handlebar moustache. In winding up he had made reference, I recollected, to an ancient Roman philosopher, quoting the tag “
non scolae
sed vitae discimus
”—“we learn for life, not school.” But then in light of that, really, I ought to have been learning all along exclusively about Auschwitz. Everything would have been explained, openly, honestly, reasonably. The thing was, though, that over the four years at school I had heard not a single word about it. Of course, that would have been embarrassing, I conceded, nor indeed did it belong to education, I realized. The drawback, however, was that now I would have to be edified here—to learn, for example, that we are in a “
Konzentrationslager
,” a “concentration camp.” Not that these were all the same, it was explained. This one, for example, is a “
Vernichtungslager
,” that is to say an “extermination camp,” I was informed. An “
Arbeitslager
” or “work camp,” on the other hand, it was immediately added, was something quite different: life there was easy, the conditions and food, the rumors went, bore no comparison, which is natural enough as the aim, after all, is also different. Now, given all that, we too would eventually be going to a place like that, unless something should intervene, which indeed it well might in Auschwitz, those around me acknowledged. At all events, under no circumstances was it advisable to report sick, the nuggets of instruction went on. The hospital camp, incidentally, was over that way, right at the foot of one of the chimneys, “Number 2,” as the better-informed were by now casually referring to it in shorthand among themselves. The hazard was concealed in the water, unboiled water—like that, for instance, from which I too had taken a drink on the way from the station to the baths, but there had been no way of knowing that then. To be sure, there had been a notice there, I could not dispute that, but all the same, the soldier ought maybe to have said something as well, I reckoned. But it then occurred to me that, hang on, what mattered was the end result; as best I could tell, I was feeling fine, thank goodness, and so far I had heard no complaints from the boys either.

Later that day, I made my first acquaintance with a number of other particulars, sights, and customs. I might say that, by the afternoon at any rate, in general I heard more information, and there was more talk around me, about prospects and possibilities regarding our future than about the chimney here. There were times when it might not have been there, we did not catch so much as a whiff of it; it all depended which way the wind was blowing, as many discovered. That day I also saw the women too for the first time. A group of men congregating and excitedly swarming around by the barbed-wire fence pointed them out: there they were, true enough, though I found it hard to pick them out in the distance, on the far side of the clayey field that stretched before us—and, above all, to recognize them as being women. They scared me a little, and I noticed that after the initial delight, the excitement at the discovery, the people around me here all fell very quiet. Just one observation, which rang hollow and a little tremulously, reached my ear from nearby: “They’re bald.” In the big hush, I too picked out for the first time, carried by the occasional wafts of a light summer-evening breeze, thinly, squeakily, and barely audibly, but beyond any doubt, the soothing, joyous sound of music, which, combined as it was with the sight, somehow hugely astounded everyone, myself included. I also stood for the first time, without knowing as yet what we were waiting for, in one of the rear rows of the ranks of ten that were drawn up before our barracks—in the same way as all the other prisoners were waiting before all the other barracks, to the side, in front, and behind, as far as the eye could see—and for the first time, on the order to do so, snatched my cap from my head while outside, on the main road, gliding slowly and noiselessly on bicycles in the balmy dusk air, there materialized the figures of three soldiers: a somehow majestic and, I was made to feel, austere sight. It crossed my mind even then: amazing, how long it had been since I had actually come across any soldiers. Only I had to wonder how difficult it would be to recognize the members of that politely spoken, good-humored corps who had greeted us this morning at the train in these men, who listened so coldly, frigidly, and as it were from an unapproachable exaltedness on the far side of the barrier, with one of them making notes in an elongated notebook of some description, to what on this side our block chief (he too with cap in hand) said to them, these somehow almost ominous potentates, who then glided on farther without so much as a single word, sound, or nod. At the same time, a faint noise, a voice, came to my attention, and to my right I noticed a profile straining forward and the protuberant curve of a chest: it was the former army officer. He was whispering in such a way that his lips barely even moved: “Evening roll call,” giving a tiny nod, with a smile and the knowledgeable expression of a man for whom this was all happening in a fashion that was readily comprehensible, perfectly lucid, and in a certain sense, almost—hard to credit—to his satisfaction. It was then that I saw for the first time, with the darkness overtaking us where we stood, the night sky’s hues and also one of its spectacles: Greek fire, a veritable pyrotechnic display of flames and sparks around the entire rim of the sky off to the left. Many of the people around me were whispering or muttering, reiterating: “The crematoriums! . . .” though by now this was little more than the wonder that accompanies what I might call some kind of natural phenomenon as it were. Later, “
Abtreten
,” the order to fall out, and I would have been hungry, but then I learned that the bread had, in fact, been our supper, and after all, I had already eaten that this morning. As for the barracks, the “block,” it turned out that it was completely bare inside, a concrete-floored place without any furniture, fittings, or even lights, where it again proved, as in the gendarmerie stable, that a night’s rest could only be accomplished by propping my back against the legs of some boy sitting behind me, while the one sitting in front of me rested against my knees; and since I was by then tired out by the host of new events, experiences, and impressions, and moreover drowsy, I soon dropped off to sleep.