When they finished eating, Hendrik asked, “Got any more?”
Vilmos lifted his shirt, exposing a hairless, pasty midriff through which his ribs showed. “That was everything.”
Hendrik ran his tongue over his teeth. A calculating look entered his eyes. “Where did you get the bread?”
"From a dead muselmann,” Vilmos said. “He was still collecting his daily ration. He just wasn't eating it.”
It was a plausible story. By Hendrik’s nod, I could tell he believed it. Behind us, Cyuri let out a keening wail. Hendrik glanced at Gyuri and then back at us. His upper lip curled. "He’s still making too much noise. Take him to the back. All the way. If I hear him, if he disturbs my sleep, the deal’s off. Got it?"
Vilmos nodded. Hendrik, Jan, and Marco walked away, the Dutchman laughing and clapping his friends on the back. The crowd of spectators turned their attention away from us.
"Help me with him," Vilmos said, and together we lifted Gyuri to his feet and led him toward the rear of the block. It was like moving a mannequin. One that was sobbing.
The deeper we went, the stronger the stench became.
Our block was a converted stable, made entirely of wood. It was divided into eighteen stalls, originally designed for horses. The two in front were reserved for prisoner functionaries: our Blockalteste, the block senior; the three Stubendiensts, who were in charge of order and cleanliness in the block; and the Blockschreiber, the block clerk, who maintained a record of the living and the dead. The fourteen middle stalls contained our bunks. And in the rearmost two stood buckets for human waste, for at night, we were confined to our block and could not go to the latrine.
Each morning, the buckets were emptied, but a noxious cloud always clung to those two stalls and permeated the nearby bunks. During the night, as more prisoners relieved themselves, the stench of urine and feces would grow overpowering. Consequently, no one wanted to sleep near the back of the block. Those who did were either new, weak, or very near death.
This did not mean the rearmost bunks were uncrowded. With over four hundred prisoners in our block, each sliver of sleeping space was used up. Still, Vilmos and I managed to find space for ourselves and Gyuri. Many of the inhabitants of this section of our block were weak to the point of lethargy. They did not complain as we helped Gyuri climb onto a top bunk where only three other prisoners were lying. With eyes that looked massive and hopeless and oddly childlike, they gazed at us in silence as we invaded their cramped, dismal domain. Their thoughts were unreadable. Maybe they lacked the strength to think at all.
Putting my lips close to Vilmos’s ear, I said, “You didn’t really get the bread from a muselmann, did you?”
Vilmos shook his head.
"From where, then?”
He shot me a warning look and whispered, “Not now, Adam. Not here. Someone might overhear us. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
Then he began to caress Gyuri’s shaved head. He moved his hand gently, as though he were caressing the downy hair of an infant who had awoken from a nightmare. It was appropriate, in a way, though none of us were children. For we were in the midst of a nightmare. One from which we could not awaken.
Gyuri did not seem to notice the touch nor Vilmos’s gentle voice. Vilmos lied to him, told him everything was all right now. Gradually, Gyuri’s weeping subsided and his body relaxed. No longer did his limbs jump about.
He was still in a trance, though. In a tear-choked voice, he began intoning very fast. The words were barely intelligible, flowing into each other with no separation between them. It took me a moment to realize that he was reciting a list of seven names, the names of his wife and six children, over and over again.
2
The clang of the wake-up gong ripped my sleep to shreds. Then began the morning's mad scramble. Throughout the block, hundreds of prisoners, all worn-out and hungry, struggled to cast away the last cobwebs of their miserable sleep. Another dreadful day was dawning. There was much to be done and hardly any time to do it. To dawdle could mean death.
First order of business: make sure you had all your meager possessions. That none of your fellow prisoners had stolen them during the night. The loss of a cap or your clogs was punishable by a severe beating, if not summary execution.
Then it was time to make your bed. Some bunks came equipped with paper mattresses stuffed with straw, much too flimsy to provide true comfort, while others held nothing with which to cushion the hard wooden planks. There were also blankets, thin and coarse, though not nearly as many as the number of prisoners. The lucky ones got a blanket all to themselves. The slightly less fortunate got one to share. And those whose luck had deserted them had nothing to shield them from the cold but their clothes.
The mattresses and blankets were all filthy and stinking. Many were ridden with lice, bedbugs, and fleas. Lice were the most dangerous of the three—a potential death sentence. On one of the crossbeams in our block, a simple message was painted in bold Teutonic letters: Eine Laus dein Tod - One Louse, Your Death.
One of the reasons the Nazis shaved off all of our body hair was to prevent the spread office and any diseases they might carry, typhus in particular. Another reason was to deprive us of another aspect of our humanity, just like they deprived us of our names and gave us numbers in their place.
The very idea of making up our bunks, as though they were regular beds, was meant to degrade us even further. To mock us and our deplorable living conditions. To burden us with yet another meaningless task.
The Blockalteste, a perpetually scowling Pole who had been in Auschwitz since 1941, marched down the center of the block, yelling for us to hurry up, kicking those he deemed to be too slow or smacking them with a stick.
“Aufstehen!" he shouted, German for Get up. “Schnell, schnell!" Quickly, quickly!
The Blockalteste was our master. The block was his little fiefdom in this hell on earth. He could do with us as he pleased; the Nazis had granted him this power. They enjoyed having one of us do some of their dirty work for them. It amused them.
Other blocks had good-hearted Blockaltestes who helped their charges as much as circumstances allowed. We were not so lucky. Our Blockalteste was a cruel, mean-spirited brute. He relished his power over us and was quick to dispense a curse or a well-aimed blow for the slightest or even an imaginary infraction. Some nights, while we lay hungry in our bunks, mouthwatering aromas of food would waft down the block from his room, sharpening our hunger pangs, augmenting our anguish. We all knew this food was stolen from our rations or otherwise corruptly obtained. Our Blockalteste did not mind that we starved while he and his cronies ate more than their fill. It did not bother him one bit that every day men in our block died of malnutrition.
Rumor had it that before the war, the Blockalteste had been a shopkeeper. It was difficult to imagine him as anything but our harsh master, as a regular man, but perhaps it was true. His indifference to our suffering, his casual cruelty, might well have been a product of his long incarceration in the camp. Three years in Auschwitz could unravel the moral fabric of any man. I had been here for just under two months, and I could feel mine fraying as well.
I'll do the bunk,” I told Vilmos. “You take care of him."
By him, I meant Gyuri, who had spent the night mewling softly in his sleep, periodically crying out and waking those around him. Now he stood trembling, gazing about with rounded eyes and an open mouth, a look of dumb horror on his face.