Something else I have to admit: the next day I ate the soup, and by the third day was even looking forward to it. The meal system in Auschwitz, I have to say, was most peculiar. At the crack of dawn, a liquid of some kind — coffee they called it — would arrive quite soon. Lunch — soup, that is to say — was dished out astonishingly early, around nine o’clock. After that, though, there was nothing at all in this regard right up to the bread and margarine that came at dusk, before Appell; consequently, by the third day I had already struck up a rather close acquaintance with the tormenting sensation of being hungry, and the others all complained about it too. Only “Smoker” made the observation that the sensation was nothing new to him, it was more the cigarettes that he missed, and there was yet another expression on his face, besides his customary laconic air — almost a sense of satisfaction, which was rather irritating at the time, and this, I think, is why the boys dismissed it so quickly.
Amazing as it seemed when I tallied it up afterward, the truth is that I actually spent only three whole days in Auschwitz. By the evening of the fourth day I was again sitting in a train, in one of those by now familiar freight cars. The destination, so we were informed, was “Buchenwald,” and although I was somewhat cautious by now about such promising names, a certain unequivocal tinge of cordiality and even warmth one might say, a hint of a certain tender, dreamy, envious kind of sentiment, on the faces of some of the prisoners who said good-bye to us could not have been altogether misplaced, I felt. I also could not help noticing that many of them were highly knowledgeable old lags, and Prominents at that, as shown by their armbands, caps, and shoes. It was they who saw to everything at the trains; there were only a couple of soldiers whom I saw, farther off by the edge of the ramp, more middle-ranking officer types, and at this quiet place, in the gentle hues of this tranquil evening, nothing at all, or at most only the vastness, reminded me of the station, seething with activity, lights, sounds, and vitality, vibrating and throbbing at every point, where I had once — three-and-a-half days previously, to be precise— disembarked.
There is even less I can now say about the journey: everything happened in the accustomed manner. There were not sixty of us now, but eighty, though now there was no luggage with us, and then again we didn’t have to worry about women either. Here too there was a slop bucket, here too we were hot, and here too we were thirsty; on the other hand, we were also subjected to less temptation in the matter of food: the rations — a larger than usual hunk of bread, a double dollop of margarine, and also a piece of something else, so-called “wurst,” which in appearance was somewhat reminiscent of the sausages back home — were issued to us alongside the train, and I wolfed them down straightaway on the spot, first because I was hungry, then because there would have been nowhere to store them anyway, and also because, as before, they did not tell us that the trip would last three days.
We arrived at Buchenwald likewise in the morning, in clear, sunny weather that was kept cool and fresh by patches of scudding cloud and flurries of light wind. The railway station here, after Auschwitz at any rate, struck one as no more than a sort of cozy country halt. The reception alone was less cordial, for the doors were dragged aside by soldiers rather than prisoners; indeed, it occurred to me this was actually the first genuine and, so to say, overt occasion on which I had come into such proximity, such close contact, with them. I just watched the expeditiousness, the methodical precision, with which it was all accomplished. A few brusque barks: “Alle ’raus! ”—“Los!”—“ Fünferreihen!”— “Bewegt euch!”[8] a few blows, a few whip cracks, an intermittent swing of the boot, an intermittent rifle jab, a number of muffled cries of pain, and our column had been formed and was already on the march, as if it had only taken some pulls on a string, to be joined at the end of the platform, always with the same about-face, by one soldier on each flank for every fifth row — that is, two for every twenty-five striped-uniform men — at roughly one-yard intervals, not dropping their gaze for so much as a second, but now mutely setting direction and pace merely by their tread, keeping in constant life, as it were, every segment of the whole continually moving and undulating column, which somewhat resembled one of those caterpillars in a matchbox that as a child I had guided with the aid of slips of paper and prods, all of which somehow slightly intoxicated, even utterly fascinated, me. I also had to smile a bit as a recollection of the sloppy, practically sheepish escort that the police had supplied back at home that day, going to the gendarmerie, suddenly sprang to mind. And even all the excesses of the gendarmes, I recognized, could only be considered a form of noisy officiousness in comparison with this tight-lipped expertise, perfectly dovetailing in every detail. For all that I could clearly see, for example, their faces, the color of their eyes or hair, this or that individual feature and even blemish, the odd pimple, I was nevertheless somehow unable quite to get a hold on all this, somehow almost had to doubt it: were these beings proceeding here by our side deep down, despite everything, basically similar to ourselves, fashioned, when it came down to it, from much the same human material? But then it occurred to me that my way of looking at it might be flawed, since I myself was not, of course, one and the same.
Even so, I noticed that all the time we were steadily climbing on a gently sloping incline, again on a superb highway, though one that was twisting and not, as at Auschwitz, straight. In the vicinity, I saw a lot of natural greenery, pretty buildings, villas hidden farther back among trees, parks, gardens; the whole area, the scales, all the proportions, striking me, if I may be so bold, as benign — at least to an eye conditioned to Auschwitz. I was surprised by a regular small zoo suddenly appearing on the right-hand side of the road; there were deer, rodents, and other animals as residents, among which a shabby brown bear, greatly excited on hearing our tread, immediately adopted a begging pose and even promptly showed off a few clownish gestures in its cage; on this occasion, though, its efforts were naturally fruitless. We later passed by a statue that stood on the green sward of a clearing wedged between the two forks that the road took here. The work itself, resting on a white plinth and hewn from the same soft, dull, grained white stone, had in my judgment been executed with somewhat rough-and-ready, slapdash artistry. From the stripes carved into its clothing and its bald cranium, but above all from the whole demeanor, it was immediately apparent that this was seeking to portray a prisoner. The head was thrust forward and one leg kicked out high behind in imitation of running, while the two hands, in a cramped grip, were clasping an incredibly massive cube of stone to the abdomen. At first glance, I looked at it merely the way one appraises a work of art, which school too had taught, what I might call totally disinterestedly, but then it crossed my mind that it no doubt also carried a message, though that message could not be considered exactly auspicious, if one thought about it. But then above an ornate iron gate, between two squat stone columns set in the dense barbed-wire fencing, I caught sight of, and soon passed beneath, a structure somewhat reminiscent of the captain’s bridge on a ship: I had arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp.