"No,” Hendrik said after realizing he would get no help from Marco. His voice was hoarse. I must have damaged his vocal cords. “No," he said again, but his eyes belied his words. For in them I saw naked, unalloyed hatred. Yes, he would want revenge. Probably not tonight, but soon.
With a quick final glance at our audience, Hendrik pushed himself off the bunk and sauntered out of the block, trying to inject a bit of swagger in his step even in defeat. I watched him until he went outside, then continued toward my former bunk. All desire for conflict had drained out of me. I did not wish to hurt any other prisoner tonight.
As it turned out, I did not need to fight for our place. One of our bunkmates had died during the day and another had gone to the hospital, so there was space for Vilmos and me.
My dreams were wretched that night. Again and again, I chased Cyuri as he sprinted toward the fence, toward his death. Each time, I was closer than I had been in real life—a mere step behind, within arm’s reach, my fingers even brushed the back of his shirt once—but I never managed to catch him. I always ended up short and watched as he leaped on the fence.
But unlike in real life, he didn’t strike the fence with the front of his body. Instead, he did a weird turn in midair so that he was facing me as he hit the fence with his back. And each time he did so, his face was different. Once it was my wife’s face. Then it was the face of my elder daughter, and after that the face of my younger. All dead because I had failed to save them.
I watched their faces contort in agony as the electricity burned their bodies. Their hair caught fire. Their clothes blazed. Their mouths stretched wide, wider than was possible anywhere but in dreams, and flames shot out of them, like they sometimes did out of the crematorium chimneys. Their cries were uniformly shrill, daggers of sound stabbing at my core. I fell to my knees, covering my ears, but their cries pierced through, unimpeded. There was no escape from my guilt, no clemency for my failure to save my loved ones. Not even wakefulness could rescue me. I did not emerge from sleep until morning wake-up.
The next day began much as the previous one. I awoke into a haze of exhaustion, shook it off as best I could, arranged my bunk, rushed to the latrine, cleaned myself, and drank my morning tea. Vilmos and I still had the bread Gyuri had bequeathed us before he’d killed himself, and that made our breakfast a little richer. I said a silent thank you to Gyuri as I chewed on my inheritance, and made an equally silent apology that I had failed to save him.
My anxiety mounted throughout breakfast and reached a summit as we gathered on the Appellplatz to form our kommandos. I fully expected my number to be called out, to be summoned to one of the prisoner functionaries who’d learned of my existence from Andris Farkas.
But this did not happen. Rather, we marched off to work in the usual fashion. As we passed by the Czech family camp, we heard no children singing. Instead, I saw a sight that made my heart sink. In the open ground between the blocks, a few tables had been set up. Behind these tables SS doctors were lounging in their crisp uniforms and polished boots, while standing around them were about two dozen guards, all heavily armed.
Female prisoners, fully naked, were made to jump up and down before the SS doctors who examined their stamina with a clinical eye. The guards, however, did not cloak themselves in an air of studious examination. Many were grinning or laughing outright. Some jeered. Many of the women were weeping and trembling—from shame or fear or both—and did their best to shield their nakedness. But they weren’t allowed to. The SS doctors wanted to see everything. Whether the women had sores on their bodies. How much fat remained on their buttocks and breasts. If they had suffered an injury that would render them incapable of hard labor.
Each man in our kommando knew what this was. A selection. A process by which the SS would winnow the sick and worn-out prisoners from the general population of the family camp. Those selected were deemed useless to the Third Reich and therefore condemned to death.
And the children? What about the children?
They were probably cowering in their block, covering their ears so they wouldn’t hear their mothers and sisters and aunts crying. In all likelihood, this would prove just as futile as my covering my ears in my dreams. I couldn’t help but think that since a selection was taking place among the grown women, another would likely follow among the children.
The thought made me want to weep, just like these women. But I held the tears back by sheer force of will. I did not want my vision to blur. I wanted to clearly see the faces of all the SS doctors and guards performing this selection, and I added them to the growing list in my head. A list of those I had already judged and sentenced to death—if I survived this place.
I toiled in the trenches under the blazing sun, Vilmos by my side. It was hotter than yesterday, and sweat poured down my back and stung my eyes. That morning during washing, I had discovered a rash along my left side and lower back. I needed an ointment, but of course there was none to be had. The inflamed skin itched and prickled maddeningly. I scratched at it through my clothes, unable to stop, suspecting as I did so that I was only aggravating my condition. My left foot was an even bigger problem. The blister around the knuckle of my big toe had burst, and judging by the swollen red skin around it, infection had set in. I had cleaned the area as best I could that morning, but every step in my heavy, tight clogs was like rubbing salt into the wound. It was not the only sore on my feet, just the worst one. Each morning, when those who had died in the night were heaped outside the blocks, I scoured their feet for larger clogs. But so far, I had come up empty.
Lunchtime soup was distributed by the same kindhearted prisoner as yesterday. He smiled at Vilmos and me, but then his smile faltered.
"What happened to your friend?” he asked. In the ordinary world, the question would have been different. Where’s your friend? perhaps, or Is he on holiday? But in
Auschwitz people did not have other places to be. They were expected to follow a routine. If they didn't, one tended to assume the worst.
"He died yesterday," Vilmos said.
"Already? But he was new, wasn't he? Way he looked, I would have thought he’d been here just a few days."
"He threw himself at the fence," I said.
The soup distributor grimaced. "Poor fellow." Then a sort of dreamy look entered his eyes, and I knew he was thinking that maybe Gyuri was the smart one among us. At least his suffering was over.
He blinked back to the moment when I asked about the soup. "Rather poor today. Just turnips and parsnips, and not much of either. But I’ll do my best for you."
He did precisely that, and Vilmos and I sat with our bowls and proceeded to empty them. As usual, we ate to blunt our hunger, not for enjoyment.
As I ate, I gazed at the spot where Gyuri had spilled his soup, where I’d nearly come to blows over an overripe piece of potato encrusted with dirt, and I could scarcely believe that what I was experiencing was reality and not some ultra-vivid nightmare.
This place, this hellish place—it shouldn’t exist. It couldn’t. The mind rebelled against it. It was an insane delusion brought to life, a psychopathic hallucination made real. And it infected every single person it pummeled and trampled, breaking not just their body and spirit but their mind. Detachment and insanity each offered its siren song—a means of escape from some of the hardships Auschwitz imposed upon us. And, of course, there was the ultimate escape, the one Gyuri had chosen; perhaps the most seductive of them all. I struggled against all three and was never sure how far I was from succumbing.