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TWENTY THOUSAND A DAY


FIRST CAME THE black limousine. We waited expectantly. Then came trucks loaded with wood. We knew, this was Kramer, the chief of crematories, the same one who had stopped us when returning from the fields.
For some days now we had felt excitement in the air. They were getting ready for something. All functions had been allotted—the camp was being organised for burning. Prisoners were digging ditches around the crematories. The furnaces could not handle such a large number of corpses. So, in addition, holes were being dug. We heard the unbelievable fact that they were to burn people alive.
Berlin had issued an order: Burn eighty thousand Hungarian Jews within a month and a half.
Wala and the others from the political office had told us that immediately after receiving this order, a “devil’s council” had been held in the camp. Hustek, Kramer, Mohl and the others took part in it. Putting their heads together above the table they planned how to burn eighty thousand human beings. Twenty thousand a day—that would be child’s play.

* * *

‘They’re coming!’ Cesha called as she ran swiftly through the office.
I looked through the window. I could see a mob of people milling around on the railway ramp. It was 11 o’clock in the morning. The whole camp was tensely waiting for the transports. Five hundred Jewish women had been brought to Canada from the women’s concentration camp. They would soon be very busy. The Sonderkommando, composed of men selected from the camp and the SS, waited for wine and food. And the whole great Reich waited for the booty.
And they came, all unsuspectingly. At the cross roads they were separated into two groups. One group went straight toward the “little white house”, along the path, past the birch forest. The other group turned right and walked towards us. They had to pass our blocks to crematory No. 3. We could distinguish the mothers from the children. There were only women. Women in headscarves or coats, rich, poor, young and old women, peasant women from the Hungarian provinces. They hugged their children closely. Small children were carried by their mothers, older children clung to their mothers’ skirts and still older children looked around with suspicion. They passed slowly. They were tired. Some looked a little uneasy, but none seemed to suspect the truth.
We pretended to be working. Our kapo had warned us that our chief would look in on us when we least expected him. We were to act as if we did not see or hear anything.
From my seat near the window I saw everything and everybody. They walked in a long, unending procession. At intervals, there was a guard carrying a rifle. The women talked to each other; some were even smiling.
The procession had already reached the crematories and there was still no end in sight. The end came after ten long minutes. The oldest women closed the procession. Some could not walk. They had to lean on their younger companions and stopped at short intervals to rest. The guards, irritated at their slow pace, prodded them on with rifles. At the very end, at a little distance behind the procession, walked a very old woman. Her arms were spread out and she leaned heavily against the guard’s rifle. She dragged her feet and her dim eyes were turned towards the sky.
The young, eighteen-year-old guard pushed her on impatiently. His face brightened when he noticed us. He snapped back his rifle and straightened up. The old woman sprawled on her back. The guard scratched his head, as if trying to make us laugh. His face took on a worried, clownish expression. Then he quickly seized the woman by the hand and began to drag her toward the crematory.
After a short pause came the men. They seemed more agitated than the women, but they did not suspect the truth either. There had been no selection. Young and old were going to the gas. About an hour later the chimney of the fourth crematory, which was just behind our dormitory barrack, began to gush flames. Simultaneously, smoke began to rise from the hole that had been dug near the crematory. At first a thin grey ribbon appeared then thick billows, growing heavier until they spread like a cloud veiling the sky over that part of the camp. The wind moved the cloud in our direction. The smoke covered the sun and the bright light of the day turned into darkness. The smoke carried the smell of burning flesh. It was something like the smell of a burning goose, only much stronger. It choked and stupefied—my head grew heavy with it.
We sat silently holding our heads in our hands. We closed our eyes.
‘Shut that window!’ Nella broke the tense silence. ‘The smoke will kill us.’
Swaying on my legs, I closed the window. A few minutes of silence followed.
‘Open that window,’ Tanya said. ‘I can’t bear it. The smoke’s getting through anyway.’
I opened the window. Just then the roar of a thousand voices tore through the clouded air. It lasted from two to three minutes. We listened, it came from the direction of the “little white house”.
‘The end of the world has come,’ Zhuta moaned. She began to pray.
‘That came from the ditches,’ Irene explained. ‘They’re burning them alive.’
The cries faded away. The orderly-room door flew open. We turned our dazed eyes in that direction. Janda looked at us with her penetrating, serious eyes as if to say, ‘I know what you feel, but that’s the order and you must be silent!’
Days and weeks of unceasing dread followed. The Hungarian transports were going to the furnace without selection.
Later they began to select the younger ones at the railway ramp. After they had been disinfected and their hair had been shaved off, they went to the empty Gypsy camp where five hundred persons were packed into one hut. Older people and children marched to the crematories. Each day, twelve to thirteen freight trains pulled up the ramp. All the luggage and packages were unloaded there.
Large trucks brought clothing from the crematories to Canada. A thousand girls worked in Canada day and night.
Log wood had been piled along the whole length of the road from Birkenau to the women’s camp. Did they want to set all of Europe on fire?
The traffic was heavy on the Canada street. Loaded trucks drew up to a barrack and empty trucks returned to the crematories continuously. The girls worked feverishly sorting the still warm clothing under the constant surveillance of the forewoman and the shrill whistle of the Canada policewoman, who seemed to be everywhere whistling and beating. The segregated goods were loaded on other trucks and taken to the barracks.
The girls worked through the night, in the light of the huge reflector and of the red flames from the chimneys. They worked in the smoke and soot. They moved amid the roar of trucks, the shouts of the drivers and supervisors, the gun fire of the SS guards. All through the night we could hear the whistles of the trains bringing new victims.

* * *
Parcels began to arrive again. There really must have been a bottleneck at the post office because of the increased number of trains. But parcels were not essential now. Bacon was literally lying on the streets. One simply chose the right moment, when the SS guard moved away, and slipped into Barrack 13—the food-hut. With the help of the Jewish men working there, one could pack one’s case with fats, sugar, cereals, noodles. It was more difficult to obtain canned foods. You had to know someone well. The boys organised canned foods and gave them to their dear ones.
We were not hungry now. But the thought of food made us sick. The camp menu, however, had not changed. Everybody still got the same ration of bread, margarine and turnips.
We could not smuggle anything into the camp because guards had been doubled and we could not find an excuse for going there. Usual transports came very rarely. We wondered where the Aryan transports were going from Pawiak or from the Montelupe prison in Cracow or the Brygide prison in Lvov.

* * *

One day we were called to a transport. They must have been brought here by mistake. Probably some prison had not been notified that no transports were to be sent to Auschwitz. In spite of the strict rules, we entered the camp by the death trail. A train pulled up as we crossed the camp gates. Our chief pulled at his moustache. We marched smartly in columns of five stepping on strewn objects which had been lost or abandoned by the condemned. We walked over satchels, coats, hats, handkerchiefs, prayer books, paper money, photographs and all kinds of papers.
Logs of wood stacked up along the road presaged more transports. Men from the evacuation squad, with large crosses painted on their backs, were clearing the cattle cars. They threw out suitcases, parcels and empty baby carriages.
The transport stood in front of the “little white house”. The SS uniforms stood out brightly against the dark silent mass of human beings. All the SS wore white gloves. Hössler was directing the people with his cane. The Jews were divided into two groups. At times I could see the despairing gesture of a hand as a mother was separated from her daughter. The older people and the children moved toward us. I noticed guards with pointed machine guns standing in the ditches on both sides of the road. We entered the empty camp. The only people moving about were guards with chamber pots and room-orderlies with barrels of soup. A head kapo suddenly appeared carrying her whip, a block-senior or an overseer accompanied by a dog patrolling the crowded, rotting huts. The camp was not important now. Abandoned to itself, it rotted in the stench of mouldy turnips and odorous chamber pots. Lousy Musselmen sat on their bunks in complete, passive hopelessness. Sometimes one of them would start at a sound. She would then lift her wretched face and look around with a dazed, uneasy glance.
They would become a little livelier whenever one of us appeared. They knew we were near a radio and we had more freedom of movement.
‘Is it true that they are near? Is it true that there’s an offensive not far from here? Is it true that our boys are organised, that they are fixing something?’
‘Of course it’s true,’ we answered without hesitation. ‘It won’t be long now and the boys are ready. Something may happen any minute now. Just be patient a little longer.’

* * *

On our way back we heard the last cry from crematory No. 2. Our chief was with us. We marched again over the death trail in even columns of five, with our lips set tight. People who had been selected on the ramp stood on the road. Unsuspecting men waited their turn in the birch wood. They were eating rolls and hard boiled eggs. The egg shells reminded me of picnics in the country. With difficulty I restrained myself from calling out to them, ‘How can you eat your eggs? Can’t you hear the cries? Don’t you see the fire? Don’t you sense the smell of corpses from the gas chambers?’ But they saw only the trees, the sun and the cloudless sky.
The guards showed the muzzles of their machine guns above the ditch. The men in the woods trembled. Their troubled eyes sought an explanation. A man knelt and leaned his head against a tree. He was praying.
We turned to the right toward our gates. The transport went straight to the “little white house”. A little girl picked a flower. Our chief became furious. How could she destroy flowers! How could she spoil the grass! She had the whole road to walk on. A cultured, civilised German could not stand the sight of such destruction. He ran up to the child who could not have been more than four years old, and kicked her. The child tumbled and fell on the grass. She did not cry, she only clutched at the flower stem—the flower was gone. She stared at the SS man with wide-eyed surprise. Her mother lifted the child and went with the others. The child turned her head and continued to look at our chief over her mother’s shoulder.
‘The eyes of that child condemned the whole German nation,’ Tanya whispered.