If we’d been given any information regarding the makeup of the soup, we might have planned our moves in advance. As it stood, we never knew what lay in store for us until the final moment. And still, some prisoners fared better than others. Partly that was due to experience: the longer your imprisonment, the better your eye for such matters. And partly it was due to nothing but dumb luck, which seemed to cling to some prisoners while turning its back on others.
The one person who did know was the prisoner who distributed the soup. Be on his good side, and he might plunge his ladle deeper to dump a hunk of turnip or potato in your bowl. Be on his bad, and he might skim the thin liquid off the top.
Regardless of what you got, it was never enough and far from satisfactory. The vegetables were often rotten, the potatoes were past their prime, the meat had a strange texture. And the overall taste was invariably foul. But if I were ever offered a greater portion, I never refused.
The line was as orderly as starving men could make it. There were shoves and the occasional punch, punctuated by curses and threats in multiple languages, and the sizzling desperation of men whose empty stomachs were driving them to the brink of madness. Everyone jostled for position, attempting to switch places as they got closer and thought they could spy what ingredients the soup held.
Our place was at the middle of the line. During the morning, one of the other prisoners had died. One minute he was hauling buckets of dirt, the next he was lying prone on the ground, unmoving. Cyuri had inherited his bowl, which he now held toward the prisoner in charge of the soup.
"Hungarian, are you?” the prisoner asked Cyuri. He had a Carpathian accent.
Cyuri nodded, and I said, "All three of us are.”
The prisoner dipped his ladle low, bringing up two pieces of potato, and filled Gyuri’s bowl almost to the brim. He did the same for us. His mouth stretched into a smile at once sad and kind. “I’ll try to keep some for you," he said. “Check with me after everyone gets their share."
We thanked him and sat on the ground to eat. The soup was watery and had a muddy hue. The potatoes were speckled with dark spots. The smell would extinguish the appetite of anyone who wasn’t starving. Trying to ignore the taste, I finished my portion quickly and licked the bowl clean. Vilmos ate more slowly. Cyuri didn’t touch his food. He just stared at his bowl with a disgusted expression.
"Go ahead," Vilmos told Cyuri. “You have to eat.”
Cyuri nodded shakily, tilted the bowl, and worked one of the potato pieces into his mouth. He gave it two chews, swallowed, and then his face spasmed. He gagged, retched, and the bowl slipped from his grasp, tumbling over and spilling its precious contents on the ground. I stared dumbstruck at the soup seeping into the dirt. The waste horrified me. Another surge of rage at Gyuri pulsed through me. How could he be so stupid?
The second hunk of potato lay on the ground like a diamond coughed up by the generous earth after a flood. Two other prisoners, gaunt and bony, scuttled toward it on all fours like rats. I hurled myself at the potato, clutched it in my fist, and snarled at the would-be marauders like a wild animal. My teeth were bared, the hand holding the potato pressed to my chest and the other balled into a fist so tight that my fingernails dug painfully into my palm.
The two prisoners stopped dead in their tracks. Their eyes glittered with ravenous, mad hunger. Saliva coated their lips. Both were breathing hard. Both weighed me, and each other, with their eyes, each determining whether he could beat the other two and whether the prize would be worth the inevitable bruises, cuts, or worse.
For my part, I was not a man at that moment but a starving mongrel, with a piece of raw meat under its paw it would die to keep. Not only die, but kill as well. In that moment, I would have gladly torn those men apart with my bare hands. I would have ripped their throats with my teeth. I would have gouged their eyes out with my fingernails. All to keep possession of a single hunk of potato the size of a small lemon. It was mine. I would have given up my last shred of humanity before I’d let them have it.
We stood like that for what seemed an eternity, but in truth was no more than a second or two. My heart pounded in my scrawny chest. My pulse drummed in my ears. My skin vibrated with insane craving and burned with anger—at the two prisoners, at the Germans who had forced us to descend to such bestiality, at the Hungarian authorities who had expelled us with such glee, at God who had deserted us.
"It’s mine," I said at length, my voice rough and barely recognizable. “Back off.”
The two other prisoners eyed me for a second longer, then the tension left their bodies, their heads slumped between their narrow shoulders, and they turned and slunk away like dogs who had been struck on the snout by their master. In their wake, they left a cloud of shame as suffocating as the one that now enveloped me. My God, what have I become? What have I allowed the Nazis to make of me?
A hand touched my shoulder, and I jumped and swirled around. It was Vilmos, his face full of compassion and understanding.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right, Adam."
But it wasn’t, and we both knew it. We knew that each time we squabbled over food like alley cats, or searched through the clothes of the dead like grave robbers, or felt a shameful relief when we survived a selection while our fellow prisoners were marked for the gas chambers, that we were shedding another layer of the men we’d once been and becoming something less than human beings—which was just what the Nazis considered us to begin with.
Gyuri had crumpled to the ground after spilling the soup. He now sat off to the side, his head buried in his hands, moaning in a low, broken voice, “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” over and over again. His shoulders were quaking, though it did not sound like he was crying.
I unclenched my fist and stared at my bounty. It was a sorry treasure—mottled with age, streaked with dirt, shapeless and crumbling. But a treasure nonetheless. I looked at Vilmos and saw him licking his lips. He offered an apologetic smile and gave a tiny shrug as if to say, What else can we do? We have to live, don’t we?
I nodded wordlessly. It was best to say as little as possible. Whatever I could say would sound like an excuse, similar to a criminal attempting to justify his crimes. With a dirty finger, I carved the hunk of potato into two pieces, as equal in size as I could make them, and offered Vilmos the bigger one. He blew on it to dislodge whatever dirt had not embedded itself into the potato and shoved it in his mouth. I did the same, and we both chewed, not looking at each other until the food had disappeared down our throats.
7
The Hungarian prisoner in charge of the soup shook his head sadly when Vilmos and I came to collect a second helping. “Nothing left, I'm afraid. The bastards did not even give me enough for everyone.”
Cyuri, exhausted, had curled up on the ground and fallen asleep almost instantly. Vilmos and I sat close to him. With a short stick, Vilmos scratched a large square in the dirt between us, then divided it into an 8x8 grid of smaller squares. In some of these squares, with his forefinger, he drew letters. Each letter corresponded to a chess piece in Hungarian—K for kiraly, king; V for vezer, queen; B for bastya, rook; and so on. Some of these letters were capitalized, indicating my pieces; the other letters were Vilmos’s. His army was bigger and also better positioned.
This particular game had started two days ago and had been played in installments since, whenever we had the chance. Vilmos remembered the disposition of the pieces from one session to the next. The first time he'd suggested playing chess, soon after we’d arrived in Auschwitz, I scoffed at the idea, saying it would be impossible. But he had proved me wrong.