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.