Fatelessness (15 page)

Zeitz, or to be more precise the concentration camp named after this place, lies a night’s ride by freight train from Buchenwald, then a farther twenty or twenty-five minutes’ march, under military escort, along a highway fringed by plowed fields and well-cultivated rural land, as I myself had the chance to find out. This would at least be the final place of residence, we were assured, for those from our ranks whose names came before the letter “M” in the alphabet; for the rest the destination was to be a work camp in the city of Magdeburg, which from its historical renown had a more familiar ring to it—so we were informed, while still at Buchenwald, again on the evening of the fourth day, on a monstrous parade ground lit with arc lamps, by various high-ranking prisoners holding long lists in their hands. The only thing I felt sorry about was that it meant I would finally be parted from many of the boys, “Rosie” above all, and then, unfortunately, the sheer vagary of the names by which we were boarded onto the train separated me from all the others too.

I can tell you there is nothing more tiresome, more exhausting, than those exasperating strains that, so it seems, we must undergo each time we arrive at a new concentration camp—that was my experience at Zeitz anyway, after Auschwitz and Buchenwald. I could see straightaway that this time I had arrived at what was no more than some kind of small, mediocre, out-of-the-way, so to say rural concentration camp. It would have been pointless looking for a bathhouse or even a crematorium here: it seems those are trappings only of the more important concentration camps. The countryside too was again a monotonous flatland, with some distant blue range—the “Thuringian Hills,” I heard someone say—visible only from the far end of the camp. The barbed-wire fence, with a watchtower at each of the four corners, stretches right alongside the highway. The camp itself is square in plan—in essence, a large, dusty space that is open over toward the gateway and the highway beyond, while the other sides are enclosed by huge tents the size of an airfield hangar or a circus big top; as it turned out, the only point of the protracted counting, column formation, harassment, and pushing around was to assign the prospective inmates to each and every tent, or “Block” as they called them, and line them up, ten abreast, in front of it. I too finished up at one of them, to be absolutely precise, the tent on the far right in the hindmost row, if one were to take bearings from where I was standing, face to the gate and back to the tent, and for a very long time too, to the point of numbness under the unending burden of that now ever more disagreeable day. It was useless casting glances around in search of the boys; the people around me were all strangers. To my left was a tall, thin, slightly peculiar neighbor, continuously muttering something to himself and rocking his upper body rhythmically to and fro, while to my right was a broad-shouldered man, more on the short side, who spent his time directing tiny spitballs, tersely and highly accurately, at regular intervals into the dust in front of him. He likewise looked at me, the first time just fleetingly but then the next time more searchingly, with his crooked, sparkling, button eyes. Under those I saw a comically small, seemingly almost boneless nose, while he wore his prison cap jauntily tilted to one side of his head. So, he asked on the third occasion, and I noticed that all his front teeth were missing, where did I come from, then? When I told him Budapest, he became quite animated: was the Grand Boulevard still there, and was the No. 6 streetcar still going as it had been when he “last left it,” he immediately inquired. Sure, I told him, everything was the same; he seemed happy at that. He was also curious as to how I “got mixed up in this here,” so I told him: “Simple: I was asked to get off the bus.” “And then?” he quizzed, so I told him that was all: then they transported me here. He seemed to wonder a little at that, as if he were maybe not quite clear about the course life had taken back home, and I was about to ask him . . . but by then I was unable to do so because at that instant I received a clout on the face from the other side.

I was virtually already sprawling on the ground before I heard the smack and its force began to sting my left cheek. A man was standing in front of me, in black riding dress from head to toe, with a black beret on his head of black hair, even a black pencil moustache on his swarthy features, in what, to me, was a billow of an astonishing odor: no doubt about it, the sweetish fragrance of genuine cologne. All I could pick out from the confused ranting were repeated reiterations of the word “
Ruhe
,” or “silence.” No mistaking it, he appeared to be a very high-ranking functionary, which the preeminent low number and green triangle with a letter “Z” on his left breast, the silver whistle dangling from a metal chain on the other side, not to speak of the “LÄ” in white lettering sported by his armband, each in itself, only appeared to reinforce. All the same, I was extremely angry as, after all, I was not used to being hit, and whoever it might be, I strove to give expression—decked though I might be, and if only on my face—to passable signs of that rage. He must have spotted it too, I suppose, because I noticed that even as he carried on with his incessant bawling the look in those big, dark eyes, seemingly almost swimming in oil, meanwhile took on an ever-softer and, in the end, well-nigh apologetic air as he ran them attentively over me, from my feet right up to my face; that was somehow an unpleasant, embarrassing feeling. He then rushed off, people stepping aside to make way for him, in the same stormy haste with which he had materialized just beforehand.

After I had picked myself up, the neighbor to the right soon inquired whether it had hurt. I said to him, deliberately loud and clear: no chance. “So it won’t do you any harm to mop your nose, then,” he supposed. I touched the spot, and there was indeed red on my fingers. He showed me how I should tip my head back to stem the bleeding, and made this comment about the man in black: “Gypsy,” then, following a brief pause for reflection, as an afterthought: “The guy’s a homo, that’s for sure.” I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to say, and indeed asked him what the word meant. He chuckled a bit and said: “Like—queer!” That clarified the notion a bit better for me, or near enough, I think. “By the way,” he went on to note, stretching out a hand sideways, “I’m Bandi Citrom,” whereupon I told him my name as well.

He for his part, I later learned, had reached here from a labor camp. He had been conscripted as soon as Hungary entered the war because he had just turned twenty-one: so he was fitted for labor service by virtue of age, race, and condition, and he had not been back home even once in the last four years. He had even been in the Ukraine, on mine-clearing work. “What happened to the teeth, then?” I asked. “Knocked out,” he replied. Now it was my turn to be surprised: “How come . . . ?” But he simply said it was “a long story,” and did not give much else away about the reason. At all events, he “had a run-in with the sergeant of his corps,” and that was when his nose, besides other bones, had been broken: that was all I could get out of him. He was no more forthcoming about the mine-clearing: it took a spade, a length of wire, plus sheer luck, as he put it. That is why very few were left in the “punishment company” at the end, when Germans arrived to replace the Hungarian troops. They had been glad too, because they were immediately offered a prospect of easier work and better treatment. They too, naturally, had stepped off the train at Auschwitz.

I was just about to take the prying a bit further, but right then the three men returned. About ten minutes before that, more or less the only thing I had registered from what was going on up front was a name, or to be more precise an identical bawl from several voices up front, all yelling out “Doctor Kovács!” at which a plump, dough-faced man, with a head shorn by hair-clippers at the sides, but naturally bald in the middle, shyly, reluctantly, and merely in deference to the urgent call as it were, stepped forward, then himself pointed to another two. The three of them had immediately gone off with the man in black, and only subsequently did the news get back to me here, in the last rows, that we had in fact elected a leader, or “
Blockältester
”—“senior block inmate”—as they called it, and “
Stubendiensts
,” or “room attendants,” as I roughly translated it for Bandi Citrom, since he did not speak German himself. They now wanted to instruct us in a few words of command and the actions that went along with these, which—the leaders had been warned, and they warned us in turn—they were not going to go through this more than once. Some of these—the cries of “Achtung!” “Mützen . . . ab!” and “Mützen . . . auf !”
¹¹
—I was basically already familiar with from my previous experiences, but new to me was “
Korrigiert!
” or “Adjust!”—the cap, of course, and “
Aus!
” or “Dismiss!” at which we were supposed to “slap hands to thighs,” as they said. We then practiced all these a number of times over. The Blockältester, we learned, had one other particular job to do on these occasions, which was to make the report, and he rehearsed this several times over, there in front of us, with one of the Stubendiensts, a stocky, ginger-haired man, with slightly purplish cheeks and a long nose, standing in for the soldier. “
Block fünf
,” I could hear him yell, “
ist zum Appell
angetreten. Es soll zweihundert fünfzig, es ist . . .
,” and so on, from which I discovered that I too must therefore be an inmate of Block 5, which has a roll of two hundred and fifty men. After a few repetitions this was all clear, comprehensible, and could be performed without error, so everyone reckoned. After that, there followed more minutes with nothing to do, and since in the meantime I noticed, on a piece of empty ground to the right of our tent, some sort of mound with a long pole above it and what could be surmised to be a deep trench behind it, I asked Bandi Citrom what purpose it might serve, in his opinion. “That’s a latrine,” he announced straight off after one swift glance. He then shook his head when it emerged that I wasn’t familiar with that term either. “It’s obvious that you must have been tied to Mummy’s apron strings up till now,” he reckoned. All the same, he explained it in a few pithy words, then added something which, to quote him in full, went: “By the time we fill that with shit, we’ll all be free men!” I laughed, but he kept a serious face, like someone who was really convinced, not to say determined, about this. Nevertheless, he wasn’t given the chance to say anything more about that belief, since right at that moment, all of a sudden, there appeared the severe, very elegant figures of three soldiers who were making their way across from the gateway, without haste but obviously very much at ease, at which the Blockältester yelled out, in a voice that acquired a new edge, a keen and screeching timbre that I had not discerned in it even once during the rehearsals: “
Achtung! Mützen . . . ab!
” at which, like everyone else, me included, he too, naturally, snatched his cap from his head.

SIX

Only in Zeitz did I come to realize that even captivity has its mundane round; indeed, true captivity is actually nothing but a gray mundane round. It was as if I had been in a roughly comparable situation already, that time in the train on the way to Auschwitz; there too everything had hinged on time, and then on each person’s individual capabilities. Except in Zeitz, to stay with my simile, the feeling I had was that the train had come to a standstill. From another angle, though—and this is also true—it rushed along at such speed that I was unable to keep up with all the changes in front of and around me, or even within myself. One thing I can say at least: for my own part, I traveled the entire route, scrupulously exploring every chance that might present itself on the way.

At all events, in any place, even a concentration camp, one gets stuck into a new thing with good intentions, at least that was my experience; for the time being, it was sufficient to become a good prisoner, the rest was in the hands of the future—that, by and large, was how I grasped it, what I based my conduct on, and incidentally was pretty much the same as I saw others were doing in general. I soon noticed, it goes without saying, that those favorable opinions I had heard when still at Auschwitz about the institution of the Arbeitslager must certainly have been founded on somewhat exaggerated reports. As to the entire extent of that exaggeration, and above all the inferences that stemmed from it, however, I did not—nor, in the end, could I—immediately take fully accurate account of this myself, and that was again pretty much what I perceived to be the case with others, indeed I dare say with everyone else, all of the approximately two thousand other prisoners in our camp—the suicides excepted, naturally. But then those cases were uncommon, in no way the rule nor in any way exemplary, everyone recognized. I too got wind of the occasional occurrence of that kind, hearing people arguing and exchanging views about it, some with undisguised disapproval, others more sympathetically, acquaintances with sorrow, but on the whole always in the way of someone striving to form a judgment of a deed that was exceedingly rare, remote to our experience, in some ways hard to explain, maybe slightly frivolous, maybe even slightly honorable, but in any case premature.

The main thing was not to neglect oneself; somehow there would always be a way, for it had never yet happened that there wasn’t a way somehow, as Bandi Citrom instilled in me, and he in turn had been instructed in this wisdom by the labor camp. The first and most important thing under all circumstances was to wash oneself (before the parallel rows of troughs with the perforated iron piping, in the open air, on the side of the camp over toward the highway). Equally essential was a frugal apportioning of the rations, whether or not there were any. Whatever rigor this disciplining might cost you, a portion of the bread ration had to be left for the next morning’s coffee, some of it indeed—by maintaining an undeflectable guard against the inclination of your every thought, and above all your itching fingers, to stray toward your pocket—for the lunch break: that way, and only that way, could you avoid, for instance, the tormenting thought that you had nothing to eat. That the item in your wardrobe I had hitherto regarded as a handkerchief was a foot cloth; that the only secure place to be at roll call and in a marching column was always the middle of a row; that even when soup was being dished out one would do better to aim, not for the front, but for the back of the queue, where you could predict they would be serving from the bottom of the vat, and therefore from the thicker sediment; that one side of the handle of your spoon could be hammered out into a tool that might also serve as a knife—all these things, and much else besides, all of it knowledge essential to prison life, I was taught by Bandi Citrom, learning by watching and myself striving to emulate.