Cimmerian: A Novel of the Holocaust (10 page)

Steiner returned from the medic not looking happy. He did not appear surprised to find the Kommandant. Peter was dismissed and left him there sitting in the chair, watching, sucking his cigarettes, drawing rest from what was happening below.

Outside low clouds clung stubbornly to the sky. With the ceaseless smoke it had been weeks, perhaps months, since Peter had seen a star or the shape of the moon. The winter sun was a dim light through the perpetual overcast.

Wolff ordered him to supervise the SonderKommando emptying the shower. There was no describing the horror. Since Eva’s betrayal and death Peter had busied himself with duty. Duty had become the sole means to save himself and he drew strength of purpose from his anger towards the prisoners. It was because of them he was here. It was they who made this place the hell it was. They lived like animals and deserved no better than was given them.

But the bodies were another matter. At the fires Peter had seen them piled and consumed. He thought he was immune to the disposal of the material but learned otherwise.

When the shower was opened the bodies filled the chamber perhaps two-thirds of the way to the top, piled highest at the two doors. There was always a residual odor from the gas permeating the grotesque scene. The smell of prussic acid along with the vomit and defecation from the dead was the new stench with which he lived. Together with the acrid, nauseating smell of the smoke from the nearby crematoriums this was the smell of death.

At the edges of the chamber were the bodies of the last to die. Those piled on top of the bodies were the ones who found the final pocket of life-giving air before the gas fully engulfed the room. Here were the strongest, always men, usually young.

When the door was opened the first bodies that were piled against it tumbled out like sides of meat. Scenes of the violent struggle were on everyone. Blood flowed from eyes, nose and ears. The bodies looked as if they had been beaten. The children on the bottom had been trampled and their skulls were often crushed.

The two kapos did the preliminary work with their gas masks on but it was the trustees without masks who dragged the chamber clear. There was a small area midpoint towards the improvised fires were the naked bodies were lain.

By the time Peter was assigned this task with the SonderKommando, they no longer shaved the hair from the women. It had been an excellent insulation for U-boats but the condition of the war was such that they had not the means to transport it. The naked bodies were still quickly searched for contraband. On rare occasions a valuable was found in an orifice, clutched in a hand or concealed in the mouth. Experienced trustees pried teeth with any gold from the dead and placed them in a bucket. Peter had seen these buckets many times before. The prisoners had to be diligently watched to reduce pilfering, but they were practiced and clever. They were difficult to catch, especially so since the price was death.

The stockpile of bodies had long since been eliminated. The trains arrived so frequently they worked constantly to keep the bodies burned.

The bodies coming from the shower were uniformly grotesque. It did not matter if they had been children, old men, women or young men; beauty and deformity all bore the mask of unspeakable terror and savage death. The skin was pasty and blotched, the eyes open, dull and glazed. Occasionally couples clung to one another. He could not tell if they had known each other before dying together. The children who had not been trampled were most often in the arms of a woman. All these had to be pried apart.

It was not uncommon to discover a newborn infant still tied by cord to its mother. Impending death often caused the traumatic birth for those in the last months of pregnancy. He could not adequately describe the horror of it.

Though it could take twenty minutes to clear the sixty bodies from the shower, the kapos always tried to have the job done in fifteen. They beat the emaciated prisoners, screaming and shouting constantly at them. If the twenty-minute mark was nearly at hand the kapos themselves helped out. While the next batch was loaded and gassed the bodies were examined and readied for burning. There was almost no break from the time the last was dragged to its fire and the time to clear the chamber again.

Bodies were the worst part of dying. They were the refuse of life. Peter’s father, on a single occasion, had quelled his son’s enthusiasm for combat following a teenage trip with the Hitler Youth with stories of the rotting bodies during the Great War. Peter had seen similar scenes in Russia.

In summer following days of battle the bodies would be thick. Sometimes there were more than the troops could possibly deal with, other times conditions were too dangerous to risk it.

The bodies quickly bloated and stretched their clothing tight. After a few days in the heat they appeared to be like rubber dolls inflated to the bursting point. The stench was unbearable. The flies and maggots were everywhere. The veterans told Peter that in the spring the bodies emerged from the melting snow like statues enveloped in rotting fabric. These too smelled if not buried soon.

Bodies. Peter saw them in his sleep. In his nightmares he walked on bodies. Whenever he looked down each body bore the mocking face of Eva. No matter how hardened Peter thought he had become he felt his duty with the bodies destroying what scraps of humanity he had been able to preserve until now.

When his long shifts ended it was now his habit to go again to the brothel. Even on the worst day he found time for five minutes with a whore and several bottles of beer. These were now his only pleasures in life.

With dreams of Eva gone Peter had nothing to take their place. He was hollow. He sought to blend himself into a mass with the others. In his jackboots and greatcoat, under his helmet, he looked the part. He cursed and beat and killed as all the others did. There was a certain strength, a justice even, in doing what he did as part of a group. No longer was there any suspicion that he was not as hard as he should be. His efforts received compliments.

His sex with the whores was the most perfunctory imaginable. He would drop his trousers and lay on top of them taking his pleasure exactly as he liked.

After Peter had been assigned to the bodies for perhaps a week he went to the brothel as he did every day. It was raining a heavy March drizzle and he was soaked to his skin. He drank alone at a table. There was no one he wanted to talk to. A tired whore was playing a gay tune half-heartedly on a hand accordion. Zelda approached him.

“We have a new one today you’ll like,” she said. Her cheeks were painted with rouge, her lips were a ghostly purple. She bleached her stubby hair the color of molding straw. “She was officer meat but now they send her to us. Give her a try, Peter. She is your type and comes well recommended.”

Peter turned to the new girl. It made no difference to him. He took them all now and did not care what they looked like. He had taken the whore's arm and already moved towards the stairs when he looked into her face -- Eva.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The
KZ was on a marsh at the lowest place in the valley and was a natural gathering area for mist and smoke. On those rare occasions when Peter had been away from the KZ with Kommandos he had seen its shabby buildings shrouded in mists. The forest came to the edge of the KZ, or very nearly. It was dark and forbidding. The KZ was a bleak, black place buried in a distant, nearly forgotten corner of the war.

But war was approaching. The main thrust of the Russian offensive was directed at Berlin, so in a sense they had been bypassed. But word was that Russians were now only forty kilometers away. He watched a unit of Waffen SS in their mess. It brought back all his memories of the Russian Front. They were gaunt, hard men; their uniforms well-worn and filthy. Their cold eyes were sunken in their skulls and buried beneath their helmets. They were muddy nearly to their waist. Peter understood that they were searching for partisans nearby. Max said they were on the prowl for deserters as well.

They ate their food with relish and made derogatory comments about the light duty of the guards. Peter expected they would say something about the slaughter being performed -- Peter knew it would have shocked him to see it on this scale when he had been at the Front -- but they said nothing. Germany was losing. The general attitude was that everyone deserved what they got. They moved out the same morning they arrived.

Drunkenness among the guards on duty was now rampant. Even Max worked steadily on a bottle of schnapps. The guards, including Peter, turned on the prisoners and arrivals with dispassionate ruthlessness as the Russian guns approached. They blamed them for their perpetual exhaustion, for the anxious fear that gripped them all. In training, the guards had been seeped with Nazi dogma that justified their actions. But as the Russians approached each of them, Peter believed, deep in their souls -- what soul remained -- knew what was in store for them. And because they knew what would happen once the Russians arrived they turned on the prisoners, behaving as if they were the cause of the situation.

Peter’s savagery was no less than that of the others. At first he had done what was necessary. Then, in fear, he had turned to his duty with enough vigor to save him from Karl's fate. Now he felt he was no longer the same person who had arrived here. He no longer recognized himself. He dealt with the prisoners with all the brutality every guard used, indeed that the prisoners used on each other.

###

Shortly after the morning count the day after seeing Eva, Peter watched Max, Kraas and the kapo, Schlage, with a Kommando. They were having some fun at the prisoners’ expense; sport, it was called. There were piles of bricks. The ragged prisoners were double timing with a brick in each hand, first from one pile then back. Two skeletons had collapsed. Schlage had pressed his boot against each throat until they both died. One of the men cursed Kraas, a guard Peter had never considered to have a sense of humor. Instead of killing the man he said something to Max in German the inmate did not understand. Max, who usually did not go in for this sort of thing, looked at the prisoner with a gleam in his eye.

Schlage kept the rest busy with the bricks while Kraas and Max took the inmate to the wall for shooting. Kraas had him kneel. Max held his pistol to the man's head, cocked it and then Kraas clobbered the prisoner in the head with a heavy board.

The inmate was out for several minutes. Peter thought at first he was dead. When he came to, Kraas, drunk as usual, breathed into his face and said: “That's right. You've died and gone to hell where you belong. We’re in charge down here too!”

The inmate’s stunned look said he really believed it was true for an instant. It was the funniest thing Peter had seen in months and he could not help laughing with all the rest. That night he watched the man hung with others after the evening count.

When Peter realized that Eva was still alive he had been too shocked to do or say anything. There she stood in her whore's clothes, with her whore's painted face. He had left without doing or saying anything and had not been back for several weeks. He took his pleasure in his duty. Wolff commented that the clearing of material had never gone so smoothly.

Peter’s own contribution to this hell was to introduce meat hooks. With the hooks the trustees could get a better grip on the bodies and more than once managed to clear the chamber in under twelve minutes. Hooks were bloodier, even though the dead do not bleed all that much, but why shouldn’t they have some real blood on their hands, Peter reasoned. Surely there was blood enough for all of them. They were in a bloody business for the Reich.

Peter’s physical condition had deteriorated until his uniform hung on him. His appetite had vanished. Somehow the bodies mingled in his mind until he could scarcely look at a plate of meat. The open crematoriums often emitted the odor of roasting flesh that resembled pork. He ate porridge and a bit of bread.

His hands and forearms were covered with a rash nothing alleviated. The skin around his knuckles was pulled and cracked. Every day the flesh popped open and he bled inside his gloves. The camp medic tried various bandages and salves but confessed there was really nothing he could do. He suggested changing the bandages daily but it did no good.

Peter was loosing hair as well. At first it came out in thick mats on his brush. Now whole clumps fell out and there were bare places on his head.

And he itched almost everywhere continuously. Since the itching had begun in his pubic hair, Peter first believed he had picked up crabs from the brothel, always a problem. The medic could find nothing and the itching spread. There was no cause and the medic had no treatment. The itching was terrible and nearly impossible to ignore. Under his heavy clothing Peter’s body burned with the rash and itching.

His lungs had never recovered from the shrapnel and surgery of the previous year. The bitter cold especially affected him. He was usually compelled to wear a cloth over his mouth because the air caused his lungs to ache. With winter his wounds felt raw and fresh. His reconstructed shoulder hurt in a shooting pain that even alcohol did nothing to ease. Only powerful morphine would help, the medic said, and even for them at this stage of the war there was none to be had. Peter had little strength in his left arm and favored his right one completely. So he bore the itching, his pain, as stoically as possible and went about his duty. There was nothing else to be done

Peter’s mental state was much worse. A depression now filled him. During the bleak, sterile days and the long nights of hell all winter he had reassured himself that given the circumstances he had reason to be depressed. All of Germany was verging on a state of mental collapse.

His depression was caused by a foreboding terror, Peter slowly realized. This fear was unlike anything he had experienced in Russia. He was not afraid of the prisoners and though they heard the Russians were now very close they were still a distant threat to him. He could not explain the terror he felt nor could he admit it to anyone. It gnawed at his tight gut and at night he awoke from his nightmares in a sweat, screaming out loud, for what reason he could not recall. The other guards called them screamers, those of them -- increasing in numbers -- who screamed themselves awake every night.

Peter lived in hell and could see no escape.

The terror that gripped his stomach like a vise, the terror wrapped in the constant itching and pain of his wounds, never went away. He felt as if he was falling apart, with an arm he could scarcely use, with hair falling from him in patches like an old man. He looked in the mirror and already could see the fine lines forming in his face. He was gaunt, he was old and tired. He was so very tired. But the terror sustained him in his blackest moments and in symbiosis his hatred grew.

He never knew he could hate so much. Hate not only sustained him but removed him from what he did. As he watched the disgusting bodies dragged from the open womb of the chamber he hated them. He hated the trustees who swung the meat hooks, the kapos who beat and screamed at them. He hated the long, unending queue of naked Jews, Rumanians and Hungarians who shuffled into the shower.

He hated his fellow guards, Wolff and the Kommandant. He hated this place, sunk in this marsh. It was foul and loathsome, fit for nothing but killing and the burning of bodies.

A few days before, the first tufts of grass had broken through the quickly melting snow. Spring, anywhere else, was nearly here. But there would be no spring in this place. It was all a slow descent into night. He dwelt, and had come to believe would always dwell, in this place of perpetual darkness.

That night an arctic wind, surely the last of the retreating winter, chilled him to his bones. He had been on duty through two shifts, twenty-four hours, and could not remember the last time he had slept. He was dead on his feet.

Peter could not forget Eva. Her face was constantly on his mind. Not the dark, lovely face from the goldsmith hut but the painted whore’s face she now wore.

When at last he was relieved he went directly to the brothel. He drank three beers while one of the men finished with Eva. Max had been right from the beginning, he thought. He needed to get the Jewess out of his blood. She was no different from the others.

Koch came down the wooden stairs, stamping his boots and buckling his pants. The whores were permitted a few minutes after each man to perform their lavatory, fix their faces and redress. Eva followed him in a bit with a light smile on her face. There were many fresh bodies arriving each day. She was easily replaced. Any of the women could do it.

Eva looked at Peter with the fish eyes of the seasoned whore when he took her arm. Less than a month on her back had left its mark on her. As she accompanied him up the stairs she was no different than the scores of others who had gone with him before. She gave him the whore's bump to remind him what lay between her legs and at the top of the stairs glanced sideways at him as if she had never seen him before. She licked her lips to let him know that was available as well if he preferred it the French way.

Her performance was so effective that as they entered the room he wondered if she even recognized him. He guessed she had never felt for him as he had for her. She had used him for a purpose and that purpose was now gone. He was serving another one now. Men like him kept her alive.

Peter’s appearance was altered, but surely not that much, he thought. If she did not know him it must have been the unending line of men who had used her. In time they must all seem alike.

Eva undressed efficiently as if she were alone. They had not as yet said a word to each other. She was eating better since her days in the hut. She was fuller figured, even more attractive naked than he had imagined.

For the first time with a woman Peter removed all his clothes. In the dim light of the bare bulb the room was primarily shadows. His scars across his chest and shoulder always embarrassed him. Except for nurses, doctors and his mother she was the first to see the livid scars. He did not believe Eva even glanced at them as she lay on the bed.

“How would you like it?” she asked in a practiced, husky voice. That must be the second phrase any whore learned. He lay beside her and ran his hands roughly over the body he had desired for months. There was bruising on her thighs and what appeared to be print bruises on a breast. The usual marks for brothel whores.

She took him with her hands and stroked to raise an erection. He pawed her. His exhaustion was complete, however, and though he had not had a woman in many days he did not respond. He pulled her breasts tight and rolled her nipples in his fingers. She moved down and took him into her mouth. She had him ready very shortly with considerable skill then fell back and pulled him on her. He slid in as easily as a man does into a woman who had serviced a dozen others in as many hours. She ground her hips and worked his erection with skill. As his excitement rose she squirmed as if in passion then moaned to successfully push him to orgasm. Afterwards he lay beside her and caught his wind. She got up at once and went to the corner pan.

“Do you want a wash?” she asked with a washcloth in her hand. It was a question all the whores asked and was not really a question. If he did not let her wash him she would report it to Zelda, who believed washing after sex reduced disease. Zelda would give Peter a lecture and not let him see her girls for days. When Eva was finished she said, “I must get downstairs. Madam will not let you sleep here.” He had heard the same words from all the whores. When he did not move at once she came back, still naked, and pulled at him to get him on his feet. “It is best not to undress. There is just more to get on and it doesn’t make you feel any better, does it?”

She helped him into his boots. He went down as soon as he was in uniform and she followed a few minutes later. He watched as he drank another beer. She went about the room laughing loudly, running her hand across the men's shoulders, joking. Two guards, brutal Ukrainians who patrolled the KZ proper, took her upstairs. He pictured her briefly on her knees, taking one from behind, the other in her mouth.

Peter left before they finished. The wind whipped the acrid smoke and it burned his eyes. She had given no sign of recognition.