The Fighter (12 page)

“They'll fix up this camp, put patrols and kommandos everywhere. Soon, it won't be possible anymore. We have to hurry.”

“I wish you'd stop raving, Wisniak. Your fever is muddling your mind.”

I get up in the middle of the night. I walk noiselessly across the sleeping block. Soon, I won't suffer anymore. Suddenly, a blow to the nape of my neck knocks me down. Someone drags me back to my bed. When I wake up for morning call, I remember vaguely that I wanted to walk out of the block, but I've forgotten why.

“Say, Brod, do you think you could knock a guy down with one blow?”

“Me? Certainly not.”

“You boxed, didn't you?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Listen, I have a feeling that a comrade saved my life last night. If it was you, thanks.”

Every morning, I am surprised—and relieved—not to see corpses lined up in bunches of five outside the block. In Jawischowitz, the sick are taken to a real infirmary. Nevertheless, out of the four hundred comrades in our kommando, one hundred become Muselmen after a few days, exhausted by hunger and the icy winter rain. They walk back to Auschwitz and the gas chamber.

At the end of the quarantine period, they check our health again. I've eaten charcoal to cure my diarrhea. I feel okay. Two doctors, an SS and a Polish prisoner, feel our muscles and look at our teeth, as if we were horses. They judge me fit for service. I hope to go down soon into the warm entrails of mother earth. In the meantime, we're still digging. The weather is getting colder every day. The earth is beginning to freeze. Shivering in our striped pajamas, we try to cut open the hardened ground with our picks and spades. The kapos hit us vigorously but not viciously. They just want to keep warm.

On the morning of our first day in the mine, the camp senior, a Polish criminal, delivers a short speech:

“You Jews, you've never worked in your life. I wonder how you'll manage in the mine. I'll pray to God and ask him to let you come up alive.”

The mine is a half-hour walk from the camp. The SS guards who come with us stay above ground. Twenty of us huddle in an elevator that falls a thousand feet down in less than a minute. The plunge is so violent that I'm afraid my digestive tract will expel food at both ends.

Polish miners—that is, free people, who live outside the camp—welcome us at the bottom.

“So, you Jews, you ain't eatin' fat geese and honey cakes no more!”

Some of them kick us playfully when we walk in front of them, others just spit on the ground. We reach a kind of
round chamber at the end of a long well-lit corridor. Dark tunnels branch off from the chamber in all directions. There is no more electric light, so we must turn on our headlamps.

Brod, a comrade named Gelber, and I make up a team. We will be helping two Polish miners—an old man and his younger assistant. Two black giants. The old man sighs when he sees us.

“Look at these Jews they give us! The three of them together weigh less than me…. Do you understand what I say, you midgets? Do you speak Polish?”

“Yes, we're Polish, all three of us.”

“That's a good thing. Before you, I had some Dutch Jews who didn't understand a bloody word. Look, you have to shovel up these stones and throw them into the tipcart.”

We're digging a gangway that leads to a coal vein. Specialists called blasters blow up the front of the gangway with dynamite. We remove debris, break rocks with pneumatic drills or pickaxes, shovel earth and stones. Other teams extract the valuable ore from the vein.

The young miner speaks some French, having worked in the mines in the north of France. He shovels up a hundred pounds of earth at a time and sneers when we can barely raise half that much. I do shovel up more than the old man. And besides, the young one stops often to rest. Then he watches the end of the tunnel for the foreman's light. Indeed, a faint glow pierces the darkness eventually. The old miner warns us:

“It's him!”

“
Le porion,
”
^l
the young man says in French.

We work faster. Just as I hoped, we're nice and warm in the mine. Our pajamas are as soaked with sweat today as they were with rain yesterday.

The foreman is here. He carries his lantern in one hand, an iron bar in the other one.

“How do they work?” he asks the old miner.

“Like Jews!”

The foreman expected this answer, I guess. He starts hitting me with his bar. I try to dodge, but his light blinds me. I twist and turn so he'll hit my shoulders and back rather than my head. After about ten minutes, he chooses Gelber as his second victim, but he is tired and doesn't hurt him too much. He turns toward Brod.

“Don't worry, you'll get it tomorrow. You'd better work, you stinking Jews. Especially you”—he points his finger at me—”because I can see you're stronger than the others.”

When he's gone, I can't help weeping—for the second time since I've come to Auschwitz. I am covered with cuts and bruises. There is no part of my body that doesn't ache. With most of my flesh and muscles long gone, my bones are exposed. One of my shinbones hurts so much that I can barely stand up.

The young miner whistles to express his admiration.

“You, Jew, you're a strong one. You didn't even scream. The guys who were here before you bawled and fell down….”

The old man keeps silent. It seems to me that he might be ashamed. I show my bruises to him.

“You really hate Jews! I don't think I worked so bad. Why did you want the foreman to beat me?”

“I didn't say you were a bad worker.”

“
Work like Jews?
You might as well have told him we were lazy good-for-nothings.”

“If you had started screaming like the guys who were here before you, he would have left you alone sooner. Look, now you're all bloody.”

He isn't really mean. He lends me his tea bottle and his handkerchief so I can rinse my mouth. I also wipe my face, because the kapos hate the sight of blood.

No kapo notices anything. When we come out of the mine, we're covered with grime anyway. We feel human again after our warm evening shower! Even more amazing than the shower: they give us clean pajamas to sleep in. We use our mining pajamas as pillows.

Instead of eating in the block as in Auschwitz, we sit in a dining room. They give us a soup—which sometimes includes a floating turnip—and a spoonful of jam and margarine. Every now and then, we get a piece of sausage. This is supposed to make us strong enough to lift ten tons of earth and stones each day.

On our second morning underground, the foreman tells us our two miners don't need three helpers. He sends Brod to another team.

When we step out of the elevator, we see the Polish miners who kicked us and joked about fat geese yesterday. They stare at me as if I were some kind of ape. Nobody dares kick me. I don't know what I look like, since we have no mirrors, but I can guess that my face has swelled up and turned black and blue during the night.

The old miner didn't expect me to work. “When the foreman used to beat a Jew with his iron bar, the Jew would spend a few days in the infirmary. You didn't have to be back today already.”

“I don't trust the infirmary….”

“At least you can rest a little. If you see a glow at the end of the tunnel, start working.”

Our two Poles rest more than a little. Digging a gangway is tough and uncertain work. You never know in advance what kind of rock you'll find. Then you spend lots of time waiting for the blaster, assembling venting tubes to draw up the gasses, setting up steel pillars to hold the ceiling, laying rails for hauling tipcarts called tubs. The gangway's progression is always quite slow, so the foreman can't expect us to move much faster. The miners who work in the coal vein have a very different job. They advance in a regular manner. If they tried to rest like us, the foreman would notice right away.

After a while, the old miner offers me a piece of bread and some bacon.

“No, thanks.”

“Are you sure? Is it because of the bacon? You don't eat pork?”

“I don't believe in religion. I am not hungry. Give it to Gelber.”

Of course, hunger never ceases to wrench my guts, but I have noticed that I often suffer from diarrhea after taking a beating. I'd rather be careful.

By and by, my pain subsides. A few days later, I accept the old miner's bread. We do not see the foreman for a whole week. Then he returns and asks the old miner: “So, how do these Jews work?”

“Just fine.”

“See, these pigs have been idle all their life. The only way to cure their laziness is to give them a good thrashing!”

Although I supplement our pitiful meal with half of the miner's bread (Gelber eats the other half), I feel I'm weakening again. In Jawischowitz, they don't club prisoners to death, but they let them become Muselmen day after day. The end is the same.

The SS raise pigs in a corner of the camp. When they throw vegetable peels to them, the prisoners fight to catch a few.

The young miner suggests an exchange. “I bring you some food, you give me clothes.”

I guess he worked out this type of barter with our predecessors. Clothes are easy to find in the camp, since suitcases full of them arrive every day in Auschwitz. I don't like the idea of a career in the black market, but I have no choice: if I don't find some food, I'll become a Muselman and go to the gas.

In the camp's slang, the verb
organisieren
, which is the same as our “organize,” means “to find a way of getting.” I organize a pair of socks by giving up a piece of sausage that comes with our soup. The prisoners usually go barefoot in their shoes, or wear rags called Russian socks. I put on the real socks to go down into the mine, then I come out barefoot. The young miner gives me half a loaf of bread and a dry sausage. I eat part of this treasure. I'll use the rest as currency.

On the following days, I bring down shirts and even blankets, which I wrap around my body. I get great quantities of food. I am very careful not to carry it up right away. Since they search us every three or four days, I wait until the day after a search. One evening, as I'm carrying a precious cargo, six eggs, I notice that we're slowing down as we approach the camp's gate. This means that the SS and kapos, who are no fools, have decided to search us two days in a row. Knowing this might happen, I always walk near the end of the line. If I throw the eggs on the ground, they'll punish us all. I don't hesitate more than half a second: I have to swallow them with their shells. I worry a little, not knowing whether this is possible. The first one slides down quite well, so I guess I can do it. The last egg drops into my stomach as we pass the gate.

The Polish miners are not supposed to feed us. When the kapos find pieces of bread in a comrade's pockets, they “give him twenty-five.” This means twenty-five blows on the
buttocks with their clubs. After such a beating, only a very strong man can avoid becoming a Muselman in a few days.

Some prisoners bring back cigarettes and vodka for the kapos and block seniors. They are exempt from the search, of course.

The six eggs leave a bitter aftertaste. Another time, I'll bring a piece of bread or sausage too big to swallow and they'll catch me. This smuggling is too dangerous. I'd better stop.

All the prisoners have to find food if they want to survive. Many comrades work in the mine at night and get another job when they come back in the morning. Some become servants for a kapo or block senior. They make their master's bed and wash his shirts for a few ounces of bread. Others help the shoemakers manufacture or repair boots for the SS. This task would suit me, since I know leather. I could even become a full-time shoemaker and stop going underground. Except I don't want to work for the SS. Too dangerous. The only way to avoid being shot by an angry—or playful—SS is never to go near any of them.

I remember my brother Albert, when he was still Anschel, looking for potatoes day and night. I try to put myself
in his frame of mind. Where would he find food in this camp? Why, it's obvious: he would go hang around the kitchen and see what happens. As a Yiddish proverb says: “Whoever works in the beehive can hope to lick some honey.”

I borrow a broom from a kapo's servant. I enter the dining hall without asking anybody's permission and begin to sweep. A Polish cook opens the window that separates the dining hall from the kitchen:

“You, Jew, what are you doing there?”

“I'm sweeping.”

“Yeah? Okay….”

He closes the window. I come back every evening after working in the mine. The cooks get used to me. They call me the sweeper. They give me some soup. They ask me whether I can bring up eggs and onions from the mine in exchange for a shirt. I promised myself never to carry eggs again, but I need this relationship with the cooks, so I bring back two eggs and two onions.

They give me work washing dishes. This is easy, because the prisoners lick their soup to the very last particle. I just have to rinse the bowls. There are so many of them that I ask Gelber and Brod to help me. Brod isn't too eager.

“Do you remember I was a cook in Pithiviers? This idea of yours, I tried it in Auschwitz. I managed to spend one day in the kitchen. I had hoped to be able to eat a little more than the others. All the cooks were Polish political
prisoners, guys who had built the camp in 1940. They didn't want any Jews in the kitchen. I hid in a corner and left with only a few bruises. Another Jew was less lucky. They tripped him when he was carrying a barrel of soup. The heavy barrel fell on him and broke his arm. He was good and ready for block seven.”

“Here, too, the cooks are Polish, but they treat me right, I tell you.”