On another occasion, the letters flaunted themselves at me from the arm of a man with a haughty stride and puffed-up chest whom I immediately recognized as the former army officer from Auschwitz. One day I even found myself under his charge, and I can confirm: it’s true that he would go through fire and water for his good men, but loafers and shirkers who got others to do the dirty work could expect no laurels from him, as he himself announced, in those very words, when work started. Still, the next day Bandi Citrom and I considered it better to slip into another work-gang.
One other change also caught my eye, interestingly enough with the outsiders most of all, the men in the factory, our guards, but particularly one or another of the Prominents within our camp: they altered, I noticed. I did not quite know what this could be put down to at first: somehow they all looked very splendid, at least in my eyes. It was only later, from one piece of evidence and another, that I realized it was us who had changed, naturally; only this had been harder to spot. If I looked at Bandi Citrom, for example, I would notice nothing odd about him. But when I tried to think back and compare him with his initial appearance, back then, on my right in the row, or the very first time at work, his sinews and muscles still rippling, bulging, dimpling, lithely flexing, or ruggedly straining, like an illustration in a biology textbook as it were, then, to be sure, I found it a little hard to credit. Only then did I understand that time can sometimes play tricks on one’s eyes, it seems. That is also how this process, readily measurable though its results were, could escape my notice with an entire family, the Kollmann family, for instance. Everyone in the camp knows them. They hail from a small town in eastern Hungary by the name of Kisvárda, from which many others here have come, and I deduced from the way that people spoke to or about them that they must no doubt have been people of some standing. There are three of them: the father, bald and short, a taller and a shorter son, their faces dissimilar to their father’s but spitting images of each other (and thus, I assume, quite probably of their mama’s), with identical fair whiskers, identical blue eyes. The three of them always go about together, whenever possible, hand in hand. But then, after a while, I noticed that the father kept falling behind, and the two sons had to help him, tugging him along with them by the hand. After yet another while, the father was no longer between them. Soon after that, the bigger one had to tow the smaller one in the same manner. Later still he too vanished, with the bigger one merely dragging himself along, though recently I have not seen even him around anywhere. Like I say, I saw all that, only not the way that I was now able, if I thought about it, to review it, to reel through it like a film so to say, but only frame by frame, becoming habituated to each single image again and again, and so consequently not actually noticing at all. Yet it seems I myself may have changed, since “Leatherware,” whom I spotted one day looking very much at home as he stepped out of the kitchen tent — and I learned that he had indeed found a position for himself among the enviable dignitaries of the potato-peelers — was initially not at all willing to believe it was me. I protested that it really was me, from “Shell,” then went on to ask whether, seeing as it was the kitchen, there happened to be any scraps to eat, some leftovers perhaps, possibly something from the bottom of the cauldrons. He said he would have a look, and though he was not seeking anything for his own part, did I have a cigarette by any chance, since the kitchen Vorarbeiter was “dying for smokes,” as he put it. I admitted that I had none, then he went away. Not too long after, I realized that I would be wasting time to hang around anymore, and that even friendship evidently has its limits, with the boundaries being set by the laws of life — and quite naturally so, no two ways about it. Another time it was me who didn’t recognize a strange creature who was just then coming my way, presumably stumbling along toward the latrines. His convict’s cap slipping down onto his ears, his face all sunken, pinched, and peaky, a jaundiced dewdrop on the tip of his nose. “Fancyman!” I called out: he did not so much as look up. He just shuffled on, one hand holding his trousers up, and I thought to myself: Can you beat that! Who’d have thought it! On yet another occasion, only this time even more jaundiced, even skinnier, the eyes even a touch larger and more feverish, I think it was “Smoker” I caught sight of. It was around then that the Blockältester’s reports at evening and morning roll calls started to include an occasional phrase that was subsequently to become a permanent feature, changing only in respect of the numbers: “ Zwei im Revier,” or “Fünf im Revier,” “Dreizehn im Revier,”[19] and so on, and later on also the new notion of shortfalls, the missing, losses, the “ Abgang” that is to say. No, under certain circumstances not even good intentions are enough. When I was still back at home, I had read that in time, and of course with the requisite effort, a person can become accustomed even to a prisoner’s life. That may well be so, I don’t doubt it: for instance, in Hungary let’s say, in some kind of regular, proper civilian prison, or whatever I am supposed to call it. Only in a concentration camp, going by my experience, there is not much chance of that, to be sure. I can confidently say that, in my case at least, it was never for want of effort, for want of good intentions; the trouble is that they simply don’t allow enough time.
I know of (because I saw, heard of, or experienced them for myself) three means of escape in a concentration camp. I personally availed myself of the first, though perhaps, I admit, the most modest of the three — but then, there is a corner of one’s nature that, as indeed I came to learn, is a person’s accepted and inalienable possession. The fact is, one’s imagination remains unfettered even in captivity. I contrived, for instance, that while my hands were busy with a spade or mattock — sparingly, carefully paced, always restricted to just the movements that were absolutely necessary — I myself was simply absent. Still, even the imagination is not completely unbounded, or at least is unbounded only within limits, I have found. After all, with the same effort I could equally have been anywhere — Calcutta, Florida, the loveliest places in the world. Yet that would not have been serious enough, all the same, for me that was not credible, if I may put it that way, so as a result I usually found myself merely back home. True, make no mistake about it, I was no less audacious in doing that than I would have been with, say, Calcutta; only here I hit upon something, a certain modesty and, I might say, a kind of work that compensated and thereby, as it were, promptly authenticated the effort. I soon realized, for example, that I had not been living properly, had not made good use of my days back home; there was much for me to regret, far too much. Thus, I could not help recalling, there had been dishes that I had been fussy about, had picked at then pushed aside, simply because I didn’t like them, and right at the present moment I regarded that as an irreparable omission. Then there was the whole senseless tug-of-war between my father and mother over me. When I get back home, I reflected, just like that, with this simple, self-explanatory turn of phrase, not even so much as pausing over it, like someone who can be interested in nothing but the issues that ensued from this all-surpassingly natural fact — when I get back home I shall put a stop to that at any rate, there has to be a truce, I decided. Then there were matters back home over which I had fretted, indeed— however silly it may sound — had been scared of, such as certain subjects in the curriculum, the teachers of those subjects, being quizzed on them and maybe coming to grief in my answers, and lastly my father when I reported the outcome to him: now I would summon up these fears purely for the diversion of picturing them to myself, living through them again, and smiling over them. But my favorite pastime was always, however often, to visualize an entire, unbroken day back home, from the morning right through the evening if possible, while still, as before, keeping it purely on the modest scale. After all, it would have taken an effort for me to conjure up even some kind of special or perfect day, but then I normally only envisaged a rotten day, with an early rising, school, anxiety, a lousy lunch, the many opportunities they had offered back then that I had missed, rejected, or indeed completely overlooked, and I can tell you that now, here in the concentration camp, I set them all right to the greatest possible perfection. I had already heard, and now I can also attest: the confines of prison walls cannot impose boundaries on the flights of one’s fantasy. The only snag was that if they meanwhile went so far as to make me forget even my hands, the nonetheless still all-too-present reality might reassume its rights very swiftly, with the most cogent and explicit of all rationales.