Hangman

with the pipes in full rumble and a thousand of us ready to die, a miraculous thing happened. Water started dribbling out of the steel showerheads. Just a few drops at first, then a trickle, then a small, clear, steady stream. After about a minute, the water gushed out.

We all looked at each other in shock and amazement. My eyes widened to nearly double their usual size. I sniffed the air. I looked up at the air vents. Not a hint of the lethal cloud this place was designed for. I felt the frigid water hitting my skin. It was almost painful, because we'd not had a real shower in five years. Now, in the middle of this death chamber, the parts of myself I never really got to clean were being touched by water.

Everyone had waited with his eyes closed, in shock, waiting in a tomblike silence which almost echoed itself. When we heard the water dribbling, we opened our eyes and looked at each other, astonished. We'd been prepared to die, and instead our bodies were going to be cleansed. I watched caked black patches appear on my body and everybody else's turn to beige, then to streaks, then disappear altogether.

There was no soap in a gas chamber. In a death camp, whatever people owned they carried with them. When we saw what was happening, some of us ran for our clothing and pulled little pieces of soap out of the lining. I broke nine into smaller pieces, sharing them. Others did, too. The fact that the water was cold didn't matter. What mattered was that we were alive and rubbing little chips of soap allover our bodies. Feeling soap lather and so many layers of dirt peeling off was almost like being at a party.

Some of us started laughing, the hysterical laugh of the damned given an unexpected reprieve. Some prisoners laughed so hard they pounded the walls and floors and held their sides. The shrieks and roars of desperate laughter burst out of gaunt faces, revealing yellow and gray teeth and blackened gumlines. The sounds we made bounced off the walls, sounding like the braying of a thousand donkeys.

"Those crazy Germans. They were going to gas us. And instead they gave us a shower," one man guffawed, and many of us joined in. For people who had expected to be dead, this was a truly hilarious twist.

The shower lasted three or four minutes. Then we heard an order barked on the other side of the gas chamber door: "Get your clothes on. Get dressed."

As we filed out to the room where our clothing was, some of us whispered to each other, trying to figure out why the Germans had done something so nice. Most of us were silent and bewildered. We had no towels, of course, so we dried ourselves off with our pants and jackets, which immediately became soggy. While I felt my body heat trying to dry the shower water out of my uniform, the Germans' reasoning finally hit me.

"They wanted to test the shower in case the Swedish Red Cross wants to see it," I whispered to Frank. Frank nodded, then out of the side of his mouth, said, ''I've never had such a good time being a guinea pig."

We walked outside in twos and threes, then lined up in military formation.

There were a couple of guards, a Stubendienst, and a Kapo. The Kapo, an Austrian Jew and a decent man, just shook his head.

"Somebody's crazy here," he said.

Then we marched back to the camps, but most of us were still laughing out of hysterical relief.

Despite their underlying motive--testing out their new shower system--I was surprised the Nazis let us spend so long in there to lather up and actually cleanse our bodies. For them that was benevolent behavior, especially considering how badly the war was going for them. I knew from the underground's notes I carried back to camp that by this time the Allied forces had landed boats in France and Soviet forces were sweeping into Romania and Poland.

As the German war machine deteriorated, it was a time of extremes in Birkenau. Some things got a lot better. Some things got a lot worse. It was hard to absorb all the changes. Before, at least our lives, however short they might be, had some predictability from day to day. Now, it was hard to foresee what was going to happen.

I could see that German morale was shot. I started noticing dirt on the soldiers' necks. Their shoes no longer were shined; some were even scuffed. The guards used to wear the shirts buttoned up to their neck. Now their clothes hung ragged and neglected. Obviously they were sleeping outdoors and running from the Russians and the other Allies. Now, most of the guards had been relocated from lands the Germans once occupied: Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, and Romania.

Feeling the hot breath of defeat, the Germans lashed out in the one matter over which they had complete control: our lives. That was one of the things that got worse--a lot worse. They had stepped up their executions. They also accelerated their appropriation of slave labor to work in German bomb factories and to build bomb shelters for their own people.

The Germans had even found another use for what had been the Gypsy camp.

About a week after the Gypsy liquidations, the Germans built a scaffolding about four feet deep and fifteen feet long near the camp entrance. On the platform were two poles standing vertically, supporting a single eight-foot horizontal wooden pole from which four nooses were suspended. Several stepladders waited on the ground nearby. The area was visible throughout the camp, because they wanted the hangings to be an object lesson.

A few weeks after the scaffolding was built, we saw some men forced up on the stepladders, which then were yanked away. The men fell like sacks of wheat, breaking their necks with their own weight. The hangings were done on a regular schedule, so we knew exactly when they would be. One thing about the Germans: they were very punctual. Some people wanted to watch. Not me. Almost always, the soon-to-be dead were people I knew. Almost always, the reason they were hanged was that they had escaped.

A sign of just how extreme was the German desperation, and how deep was their hatred of us, was the number of trains chugging into the camp, wheezing black smoke as they squealed to a stop beside the ramp. The procession never seemed to stop. I could see the prisoners were being crammed into the cars like cows off to the slaughterhouse. Now we were starting to see prisoners from other camps.

One sign of their discouragement was that the Germans weren't watching us closely anymore, so the prisoners would tell each other where they had come from. Some were from Russia, others from all over Poland. What hadn't changed was the Germans' rough rule of thumb: if they were old, young, or sick, they went to the crematoriums. If they were of working age and healthy, they were put in the former Gypsy camp, which now was being used as a kind of holding pen, except for the hanging area.

The need for slave labor helped make our lives a little more tolerable. Prisoners accumulated in holding pens there for a week or two, then were shipped off to Germany or Austria as slave labor. The Stubendiensts and Kapos now had to behave somewhat reasonably. As much as they enjoyed whipping and beating as much as they enjoyed seeing us run, cringe, and bleed, we prisoners suddenly had become valuable commodities. They needed us to shore up their lapsing war effort, so we had to be in good enough shape to work. Beating a prisoner to death meant losing a valuable worker, a loss the Germans now could ill afford. We were still beaten, but a lot less often and not with bone-crushing, lethal force.

While that much of life was getting better for us, there was some irony for others. In this new situation, prisoners were being hauled in from other camps an ever-increasing rate. When Kapos or Stubendiensts from other camps were shipped in as prisoners, they got no special privileges. I was better treated than some of them; I was allowed to live. For them, the same rules applied that they'd applied to others. If they could work, they were slave labor. If they were too ill, they would be gassed. Many of them had committed atrocities against the very prisoners with whom they were sharing space in cattle cars, but the prisoners were too afraid to kill them. It was ironic that the Germans often did the job instead.

In one way, the gassings produced a huge, if grim, bounty. When I was with the Leichenkommandos, picking up the dead, I saw enormous warehouses with workers sorting out piles of clothing as fast as they could. Most of the workers were women, some of whom were from my city. I couldn't ignore them. So on my Leichenkommando trips, I would slip them pieces of bread. They had soft jobs, but they had to produce work quickly if they wanted to keep their positions. Losing a job meant death.

As the pace of executions accelerated, the clothing warehouses became even more crammed. There were warehouses for men's jackets, for dresses. The Germans had separate warehouses for each kind of shoe: a warehouse for men's, another for women's. Both contained piles ranging from the scruffiest footwear to high-fashion leather. Every pair of shoes had a story and a dead person behind it. I didn't want to know the stories. I didn't have room in my soul for more pain.

However, the Germans also had a warehouse for children's shoes. That place broke my heart every time I saw it. Some of those shoes were so tiny, their dead owners couldn't have been more than a few months old.

So innocent, so clean. They did nothing to deserve this. Nothing. But they gas the children because the children can't work, I thought, mournfully. At such low points I screamed inside my mind, Why doesn't the world come to save us? They know what's happening here. I carried the letters inside my rectum to the outside. I know they know. Where are they? Where are they?

My own life had become a little more grim. Because I was on the ramp, I couldn't deliver messages anymore, and even the Leichenkommandos had stopped going out. The bright side, however, was that I still would see Max every once in a while. He often brought me good news, even occasional words of praise.

"You're still looking clean and neat, Joe. They like that. And I hear you're still trying to make sure people don't get beaten. You're keeping up the morale there, Joe," he would whisper warmly. "Do you know that?"

"Yeah, Max, I'm just trying hard to stay alive. Maybe a miracle will happen.

Maybe a miracle will happen." I hadn't told Max about my dream. I knew he'd just laugh.

"Are you a saint, Joe? Can you predict the future?"

"No, I just try to keep hoping, Max. I just try to keep hoping."

"Things are changing, Joe," he whispered to me. "We can do a lot of things we couldn't do before. We're looking out for our people."

Then he would leave, and I would feel sad. Max was one of the few prisoners who kept up my morale. I had a world of respect for him. He was a fine human being. Not many of those people survived here.

Still, I tried my best to save a few people myself. Abe Blady was one of them.

He had been shipped in from Russia. He looked a lot like my brother Hymie, who had been shot in the lumberyard. One night, Abe walked over to me while I was surrounded by other prisoners, most of whom were asking my advice or talking to me about various matters. Abe had a pleading look in his eye that I'd seen all too often in Birkenau.

"Help me, help me, please. I'm hungry, and I just came in. I don't have a job, and if I don't find one today, I'll end up in the crematorium," he said. Then he fell into my arms and started sobbing.

I was touched. I went to Blackie. "I've got a boy who needs a job. I want you to give him one."

"Is he your brother, your cousin?" Blackie said, with just a trace of exasperation.

"No, but the war's coming to an end. He's going to die." "You already brought in Frank, Noah, and others."

"One more isn't going to hurt."

I looked at Blackie. He stared back.

He asked me, "When are you going to stop?"

"When the war is over. Then I'll stop."

Another man I saved was Hana. He had come from Lodz and followed me around a lot, always asking my advice. He worked in the hospital until it was shut down. He was about six feet, one inch tall and was considered well educated because he'd finished high school. He liked my preaching about how miracles can happen. He was very religious, and he enjoyed my style. When the hospital was shut down and I was put on the ramp, he wanted to follow me. I had the connections, so I went to Blackie.

"If this guy doesn't have a job, he'll be dead by tomorrow. Give him a job," I demanded.

Blackie looked at me hard, then started laughing.

"Joe, If I don't keep an eye on you, you're going to bring all your relatives in here," he said, then walked away chuckling at his own joke. I knew he'd find a job for my newest friend. I glowed.

Even at triumphant moments like this, I could not help but be overwhelmed by the enormity of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It seemed big enough to me to be a small city. Camps upon camps upon camps. So many rows of barracks packed closely together that, from an airplane, they probably looked like tiny little beads on a string.

This place is so big, how could the world not know about it? I screamed to myself. Not a damned person lifts a finger to help us.

Still, the arrogance of the Third Reich was visibly giving way to caution, even fear. The Germans were running very scared. I heard that Americans had crossed into German territory for the first time, near a place called Eupen.

Shortly after that, almost miraculously, the beatings seemed to stop completely. One of the extremes in this new situation would have been unthinkable even a month before: I knew that the underground now had connections with the SS and the guards. I could see it. Before, if somebody had marched even a hair out of step, the SS would have cracked that man with a cane. Now, if somebody missed a step, the SS ignored it.

During one of my meetings with Max, he asked me, "How are the beatings where you are? Have they quieted down?"

"Hardly anybody gets beaten now."

"That's what I thought," Max said, allowing himself a small smile.

About that same time, a train came in loaded with workers from my city, producing one of my best chances to help save a fair-sized group of people but also producing one of the worst beatings I'd had since I had been in the camp. The workers had been taken to factories outside our town to build German planes. Now the plane factory had been taken over by the Russians. These men were skilled workers-bricklayers, mechanics, tradespeople--and the Germans were going to send them to Germany to help the Nazi war effort.

First they chase us out of Germany. Now they're forcing us to go back into Germany. The Nazis must be getting very desperate, I thought.

Sam, one of my sister Fay's in-laws, was among them. I knew him because he'd been an inspector in one of Yudel's factories. My landsmen were put in the Gypsy camp, which was near my Barracks 8. I saw the poor guys standing by the barbed wire, hollow-eyed hunger on their faces, looking for someone they knew to get them food.

"Joe, Joe," Sam called out.

I waved at him, but I didn't dare approach. It was daylight, and I would have been gassed for doing that. I didn't know the rest of the people with him, but I could see they all were hungry.

One day I passed by them on my way somewhere else.

"I'll be here Saturday night, and I will throw things over the wires at this spot," I whispered out of the side of my mouth.

When Saturday night came, I had rolled-up shirts, food, and tobacco tucked away from my time at the ramp. I packed them all into bundles and crawled up to the fence, then threw the bundles over the now-electrified barbed wire. Then I started to crawl away.

"Stop," someone bellowed. I could feel sweat ooze out of my skin. "I saw you throw something over the fence. What did you throw them?"

"Nothing but bread I picked up on the ramp." "Why?"

"They're hungry."

"So what?" he growled.

I turned around from my face-down position and looked. It was the same crippled bastard who had stepped on my hand and forced me to give up the diamond. He marched me to a barracks where there was a long oven. Almost all of the barracks had these ovens, which were only for show purposes if the Red Cross arrived. By this time, most barracks were empty, as this one was. He swung the oven door open on its side hinges and bellowed, "Put your head in, you fucking Jew bastard."

I did.

The oven had a musty smell from lack of use. I could feel my armpits gush. I knew the guy was just as likely to slam the door on my neck and break it. Instead, he closed the oven door, pinning my head inside the oven. Then he beat my back and rear end about twenty-five times with his cane. I counted the blows as they fell on me. The first few caused such a sharp pain I felt as though he'd cut off a finger. After about a dozen, my body stopped jumping around. I couldn't feel anything anymore.

God, God, is he going to break my spine? I worried, the thought dancing through the cloud of pain in my head.

When he stopped, he yelled at me, "Run, run, you Yiddish bastard. Run on your hands and knees."

As I dragged myself across the camp, I kept thinking about my landsmen. I kept thinking about their pain and their hunger and their lack of clothing. It helped my state of mind to focus on other people's pain as a distraction from my own. It also helped to blot out the pain.

'Tm not letting this swine tell me whether I can help my landsmen," I said to myself.

Later that night, some of the guys in my barracks surveyed my naked back and buttocks, which they said were black from the blood which had leaked out my veins and into the surface of my skin. But I still wasn't about to be prevented from helping my people. In here, you gave loyalty to the people you knew. I knew one of the people in that group, and the others also were from my city. I had to help.

The next night, I went again at about 10:00 P.M. so I'd miss the guard, who probably checked at the same time every night. I'd stolen more food and clothing from the ramp. Pain was shooting through my back and legs, but I just kept crawling until I got near the wire at a place different from the night before. I threw rocks through the open barracks window until somebody looked out.

"I want to talk to Sam," I whispered.

Sam came out, and I started throwing things over the fence: shirts, bread, that kind of thing. I did this run about every three nights until they were sent to Germany, two or three weeks later.

One astonishing day, the Germans acted as if they were throwing a party. The Stubendiensts ordered each of us to walk toward the front of the barracks and pick up a small cardboard box on a table. Some of the packets contained a liquid which tasted like sweet milk. Other packets had cookies in them. Still a third packet had some sugar.

Each of us wolfed down whatever didn't appear to be too dangerous to our health. Even though the small individual boxes had Red Cross markings, we were always suspicious of generous gestures from the Germans. We couldn't drink the milk because our stomach couldn't take such rich food. We would throw up right away. The cookies were nice, but what we really wanted was bread. Still, we decided to eat what we could get. We all gobbled up our cookies and our sugar packets. It helped for a little while, and it fed us a little hope along with a little nourishment.

About a week later, in another combination of extremes, something happened which gave us a real reason for hope, only to have it crushed. The guards suddenly entered the barracks with some scarred wooden tables and set out a meal of bread and soup. The bread was freshly made, and the soup had been brought to a boil. The smells of both rose into our nostrils, and I almost cried. I hadn't smelled or seen food like this in more than two years, not even during my short stay in the hospital.

My stomach gurgled and growled, as did everybody else's. The gaseous noises almost sounded like a chorus of frogs. We were starving men, and a feast lay so near to us we almost could reach out and grab it.

"You are chosen people," the Stubendeinst told us, obviously not understanding the biblical irony. This time, we'd been chosen to get haircuts and a shave. I would give a haircut and shave to one guy, then he'd return the favor.

In addition, all of us also washed our clothes and scrubbed the barracks, made our bunks, and tidied up the floor. We couldn't say anything, and we certainly weren't allowed to eat the food which was within an arm's length. We felt good, though.

"At least we're seeing a little action," I told Frank.

The Kapo kept yelling at us to behave and be clean. Because we were two miles from the crematoriums, the bacon-like odor of charred flesh didn't hang over our barracks.

We suspected why the Germans suddenly were making our lives so tidy. The Red Cross had started to make appearances more frequently, and the Germans felt they had at least to pretend they were treating us humanely. On this occasion, which was about the middle of 1944, the Red Cross inspector finally arrived. There was no doubting he was someone from the outside. He wore tan civilian clothing and carried a briefcase. He wore a hat, like a salesman's, and arrived driving a car with the Red Cross insignia painted on the side. The inspector looked us over but didn't talk to us.

God, let them see what's really happening here. Let them know that this is a death camp. Every day thousands of souls are lost here, burning in hellfire flames that rise to the heavens, I bitterly thought. I was only one of thousands of people offering this prayer that day.

It was never answered. The inspector first went to the gas chamber which we'd recently completed. To the untrained eye, it looked like a large shower room. Then he came to our barracks. He walked in, and we were standing at attention, the piles of fresh food still within reach. "Jawohl, jawohl, jawohl," he said, then walked out.

I have no doubt the inspector saw the other gas chambers and the crematoriums, but he didn't know what he was looking at. The Germans showed the Red Cross what they wanted them to see. To the untrained eye, a gas chamber just looked like a room for mass showers, and the inspectors never got to see the crematoriums.

About a minute after the inspector left, the SS just stood there and laughed at our wretched state.

"You want good clothes and food? Too damned bad," they yelled at us. "You think the Fatherland should give you good things? You, who will soon be dead? You soon will be food for the flies, nothing more."

Then they struck us with whips, kicked us with their hard boots, and beat us with their fists. We all scattered and ran out the door. They carted away the food table and chairs. Then the guards came back after us, beating us for several hours with canes, poles, their bare hands, whatever they wanted.

The air filled with the cries of the crushed and wounded. The prisoners yelled and screamed as they were hit, or fingers were crushed, or ears ripped off. I wasn't hurt badly. As always, I put my small size to good use by using some bigger men as shields.

Some things didn't change. The pace of the camp's executions still was at its highest pitch. Trains kept arriving at a rapid clip, largely from other German camps. It was the same every time. If the prisoners were physically fit, they were shipped to Germany as slave labor. If they weren't, they were gassed. The standards for who lived and who died hadn't altered much, even though the Germans needed slave labor worse than ever.

Fortunately, Mengele still acted the same--at least toward me. When he conducted selections, he still gave me that twisted half-smile. He was still trim, and I made sure his uniform was cleaned and pressed.

Despite Mengele's freshly scrubbed appearance, I could see how the war was crumbling even further for the Germans. There were many signs. For one, even the elite SS troops were standing guard. Before, they were considered too important. Now, the guards generally were more ragged. Their hair was growing shaggy, and stubble covered their faces. Most of them had a gaunt look, their boots were dirty, and their uniforms were even stained. I found out they were from the front, and Birkenau had become a kind of rest stop where they could get some food and sleep in a bed for a while.

Then, unbelievably, the pace of the executions got even more frantic. More and more death trains were piling up at the ramp. The people were packed in even tighter. Time was closing in. Other camps were being consolidated into ours even faster. Over a period of a couple of days, prisoners who had been in quarantine were stuffed into our barracks and into what had been the hospital barracks. Increasing the body count to as high as their ingenuity could muster seemed to be the Germans' top priority. The smell of roasted death hung heavier and thicker over the camp than it ever had before.

One morning, in December 1944, everything changed.

"Raus, raus, you pigs. Raus. Get dressed. Line up," a guard yelled.

We didn't even get the usual meager breakfast. We found ourselves outside, lined up with tens of thousands of other prisoners, all standing at attention. I wondered whether the Germans were going to execute us all in one last orgy of death. Instead, they started shipping us out. Each of us had to line up next to our respective barracks. There were still four or five barracks being occupied, with about one thousand prisoners in each. "Don't move around or we'll beat you," the guards growled.

Otherwise they didn't say much. We thought they'd march us into the woods, then mow us down with rifle fire. About midday, the guards called out, "March, you pitiful bastards, march."

I could feel my body get sweaty with fear again. Now they're going to kill us. It's now, I thought.

We could feel the shock waves from Allied bombs. We knew Birkenau's end was coming. We were all equally sure our end was coming, too. In another fit of extremes, I was thrilled at the same time I was in the deepest despair.

The miracle I've been praying for has happened, I thought. The Russians are coming, and soon there will be no more Birkenau. But will the rest of my miracle happen? Will I be a husband and father and have a lot of people working for me and own my own business? I don't think so. The Germans will want to destroy the Jews they have, even if they can't grab any more of us. I'm a dead man.

Then it was the turn of Barracks 8. We lined up the usual five abreast to march out. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man walk past me, briefly.

"Go into the sewer next to the pump house. Drop down into the sewer," he whispered in my ear. I didn't even know who he was, but I knew he must be from the underground. I didn't ask questions. The Germans were clearly intending to gas, hang, or shoot us.

I was standing next to Abe. We started marching, then I dropped out of line.

Nobody saw me because everybody was absorbed with themselves. I ducked away from the group and flattened myself next to the pump house wall nearest to the sewer opening. A skinny cement square layover it. I pushed it away and dropped down onto a metal ladder. Then I reached up, pulled the cover back to its original place, and climbed down the ladder.

Once I was inside, I noticed another man in the dim light, a man I had worked with at the hospital. I looked hard at him.

"What are you doing here?" I demanded in a startled voice.

"What are you doing here?" he replied, his own voice hoarse with fear.

We stared at each other for a few seconds, then nodded. We figured out that we both worked for the underground and had been told to jump into the sewer.

It wasn't a glorious way to hide. The stink and gas down there were so penetrating our eyes started stinging, and we had to put a handkerchief over our noses to breathe. I wondered what we were supposed to do when the danger passed and we got out of the sewer. Unfortunately, the guards were constantly counting us, and within thirty minutes they knew we were gone.

"What's going on? Two guys are missing," we could hear them yell in angry guttural tones. A piercing siren shrieked. Suddenly it was quiet. I thought every-ne had marched out of camp, mercifully leaving us behind. I relaxed.

About a half-hour later, we could hear a kind of low growling, which got louder and meaner. It was the barking and snapping of a hundred German shepherds the Nazis had used to find us. The growling noise bounced off the cement walls and penetrated my head so much I had to cover my ears. After what seemed like seconds, they found us. The sound of the dogs' high-pitched whining and yipping and full-throated, menacing growls, was right over the sewer entrance.

Suddenly a loud voice yelled in Polish, "Open up, you Jewish pigs. Open up before we throw in hand grenades."

There wasn't much choice. We climbed out. There were perhaps forty guards, surrounded by yapping German shepherds, their gums flashing, their teeth bared and dripping. We put up our hands. Once we'd been found, most of the guards left, taking the dogs with them.

"Jewish pigs. You're less than rats," the remaining half-dozen guards yelled at us, shoving and kicking us toward the hanging area. Suddenly we found ourselves on top of some wooden scaffolding. Surrounded as we were, we couldn't see what was happening. Suddenly a thick and hairy noose dropped over my head and around my neck. The same happened to the other man. They put us each up on a stool, then adjusted the noose.

It's ironic that I, who have spent so much time outsmarting the Germans to keep myself and others alive, should be one of the last men to die in Birkenau. There is no justice after all, I thought to myself, my mind riddled with despair.

The SS guards surrounded us in a small circle, hatred leaping from their eyes. I knew they were already imagining us dead, our faces black, bodies swinging back and forth, pants stained from the loss of control of our bowels and bladder. They tested the stools, making sure they'd support us until a heavy boot kicked them away.

Though I didn't know my compatriot very well, he was the only friend I had in the world at that moment. I wanted my death to be noticed, to mean something to somebody, if only for a second.

"This is it," I told him in a sorrowful voice.

"It was good while it lasted. We lived long enough to see Hitler going under fast," he said, choking back a sob.