Poland: A Novel Part 38

'The new supergas the German chemists invented. Zyklon-B. Kills quick and painless, I'm told. So into the room you'll go with the others who've been handling the ovens. Psssst! Here comes the Zyklon-B, and ten minutes later, guess who's in the oven?'

Szymon could scarcely absorb such dreadful information, but his informant continued: 'Another thing. Whatever you do, stay out of Barracks Nineteen.'

'Are they especially tough there?'

'They're fatal. That's where the other barracks send their men who look as if they're going to die.'

'What happens in Nineteen?'

'Nothing. That's the problem. They stick you in there, feed you nothing-and psssst! Three days later, guess who's in the oven?'

But before sleeping s.p.a.ces were a.s.signed, all prisoners were led out to a feeding area, where the planned horror of Majdanek was revealed: men who had spent twelve hours at grueling labor, many with pick and shovel, were given as their main meal of the day a small bowl of watery soup containing no meat, no fats, just a cube of black bread whose princ.i.p.al ingredient was sometimes sawdust. Those who had been in camp for some months finished by licking their bowls avidly, seeking even one additional morsel of nourishment.

Szymon had suffered great pain from the beatings he had recently taken and the bruises from the broomstick, but he experienced an even greater pain that night. He was unbearably hungry, and from the faces about him he could see that all the others were too. And as a newcomer in one of the most crowded barracks, he was a.s.signed no plank, just a narrow area on the damp ground, with only one blanket so thin that the man next to him said: 'You could read through that one.'

With the blanket wrapped tightly around him and rearranged a dozen different ways throughout the night, trying desperately to gain just a little more warmth, Bukowski spent his first night on the cold ground, aware that if this continued for long, he must die of pneumonia.

It was incredible that men who were expected to labor for the Third Reich, regardless of what work they were to do, should be so abused; Bukowski would not have treated one of his cows this way and then expected her to give milk. Toward morning, as he lay shivering uncontrollably, he realized what the program at Majdanek really was. They want us to die. They want all the Poles who might do any constructive work to die. Leaving only slaves. Despite the aching cold and his tormenting bruises, he laughed bitterly: They'll find few slaves in this country. They'll have to kill us all.

Half an hour before dawn he partic.i.p.ated in a routine calculated to speed the dying: he and all the others were rousted out, those from the damp ground confused after the sleepless night, and mustered in long lines before their barracks. There they stood, some without shoes, for an hour and a half while roll calls were taken and orders given. They grew numb. They needed to go to the latrine. They were ravished by hunger. Their feet and legs were aching. But if they moved or fell, they were beaten and returned to the ranks, where they must somehow continue to stand, waiting for the roll call to be finished.

As Szymon waited, he noticed that the immense open s.p.a.ce between the two rows of barracks was kept completely clean, not a shed or a blade of gra.s.s intruding upon the bleak expanse. However, between Barracks Six and Seventeen, in the middle of this barren waste, stood a single stout pole with a heavy crossbeam at the top. When the barracks commander was at the other end of the line Szymon whispered: 'What's that?' and the man next to him said: 'A gibbet.'

Each field had one, and here from time to time camp officials liked to conduct public hangings: 'A good execution, well-handled, brings the prisoners to attention. Excellent for discipline, and a hanging is clearly more effective than a shooting.' The executions were held now in one field, now in another, so that during any one month each field could antic.i.p.ate two or three. On this day the hanging would occur in Field Four.

It was customary for all prisoners in a given field to form a square around the gallows, to which the condemned man, his guards and the field commander would march stiffly. At each hanging the commander would announce the reason why this particular man had to be hanged, and someone in the camp, some Pole of extraordinary heroism, would write down in a secret place the name of the condemned and the charges against him. This morning the man was Onufry Unilowski and his crime was that he had spoken against the food being served and had tried to start a riot.

He was a young man-the secret records of the underground showed that the average age of those hanged at the public gibbets was nineteen-and he met his death bravely, shouting as he stood with no hood over his head: 'Resist! Resist!' A Gestapo guard bashed him in the mouth with a gun b.u.t.t and the white stool on which he was standing was kicked away. He did not die quickly, for camp officials wanted their prisoners to see the prolonged agonies which awaited them if they caused even a trivial disturbance.

Bukowski remained on the death truck for five weeks, during which he still had to sleep on the ground with only that shadow-thin blanket. He could feel weakness creeping into his bones, a.s.saulting his joints, but he was sustained by Professor Tomczyk, who lay beside him: 'Szymon, you must try to tell yourself that this is not happening. Do not fight it all the time, or you will weaken all your defenses.'

'The killing all day. The starvation. The sleepless nights.'

'The sovereign law, Szymon, is to survive. Avoid the gibbet. Avoid Barracks Nineteen. Say nothing. Do nothing. Like a bear in winter, you must go into moral hibernation.'

The old man was able to do this, ignoring the cruelest deprivations, but one morning at roll call, when, hungry and cold, he could scarcely stand, he almost lost his composure. Down the line, checking on everyone, came the commander of Field Four, a big, stoop-shouldered Gestapo man who selected those who were to be hanged on his gibbet, and on this morning he was looking for diversion. Spotting Tomczyk and remembering that he had been a professor, he suddenly grabbed the old man's gla.s.ses, threw them to the ground, and stamped on them with his heel, grinding them into the pebbles. 'You won't need gla.s.ses any longer.'

If Tomczyk had made one movement, even a twitch of the face, he would have been hanged within ten minutes, but with the discipline he had acquired during the interrogations, he nodded his head slightly in deference to the commander and somehow indicated that he was ashamed of having been a professor, or one who had read books. The fatal moment pa.s.sed, and it was a man from Barracks Seventeen who was hanged.

But when they were together in Barracks Eleven that night, Szymon saw that Professor Tomczyk was weeping, not crocodile tears to gratify his tormentors but the real tears of a distressed old man, and when Szymon asked why, Tomczyk said: 'Because I will never again be able to read a book.'

'You'll get other gla.s.ses when you get out,' Szymon rea.s.sured him, but Tomczyk said with awful foreknowledge: 'I will never get out. Thousands of us, hundreds of thousands, will never get out. They will never allow us even to see a book, let alone read one.' He took Szymon's hands. 'Learning is a beautiful thing. Wisdom keeps the world functioning. Get learning. Get wisdom. For on you young people the future of Poland depends. Us old ones, they'll kill us all to halt the flow of learning.'

Field Four was under the command of SS Captain Otto Grundtz, one of the best men in the business. With extreme severity he operated his set of twenty-two barracks in a way which quickly stifled any protest. He was a big man, thirty-five years old, and the combination of bulging eyes and bristling black eyebrows made him look menacing even when conducting routine inspections. He had been one of the early n.a.z.i bullyboys, adept at smashing Jewish stores or liberal meetings, but he had been categorized from the first as a mere brute with little likelihood of any serious promotion. He was ideally suited, his superiors felt, for concentration-camp duty, and since n.a.z.i plans called for camps to be permanently maintained in both Germany and the conquered countries, men like Grundtz could look forward to many years of employment.

Even in Germany, where education was important, he had not attended school beyond the age of twelve and felt no need to repair the loss. He read nothing, discussed nothing, cheered when told to, and was careful to preserve an unblemished record with his superiors. But he was not a dull man. When a new procedure was to be introduced, he studied it more carefully than the other field commanders and inst.i.tuted it with a minimum of dislocation.

For example, when the camp commandant found that the barracks were becoming overcrowded because prisoners were dying more slowly than antic.i.p.ated, it was Grundtz who devised the strategy for Barracks Nineteen. He told his twenty-two subordinates, each of whom supervised a barracks, that they must watch constantly for prisoners who were a.s.signed to especially onerous tasks on diminished rations and not to allow them to waste slowly away, which might take months, but to observe the moment any man fell into unconsciousness: 'He is not to be revived. Carry him as he is to Barracks Nineteen.' There the man was to be dumped, and left to die.

On some mornings as many as fifteen or sixteen bodies would be hauled away from that barracks alone. It was efficient; it was quiet; and it furthered the objective for which Majdanek had been established.

Morning inspections, with the men standing at attention, became a time for Otto Grundtz to walk slowly down the line, shoulders hunched, big body moving forward, eyes peering out from beneath those heavy brows, trying to pick out which men might be moved on to Nineteen. When he made his decision, there was no review, which was why the prisoners in Field Four tried to use what little strength they still had not to appear sick or weak during these inspections. Among the men, Barracks Nineteen was known as 'Otto Grundtz's infirmary. Cure guaranteed.'

Unlike the other concentration camps which the n.a.z.is built in Poland-unspeakable Treblinka, which was simply an extermination center, in and dead the same morning; or Belzec, which specialized in torture; or Auschwitz, where hideous procedures were encouraged; or its terrible appendage Birkenau, whose gas chambers were able to accommodate 60,000 bodies in any twenty-four hours-Majdanek was a relatively humane center. True, it did kill off 360,000 unwanted Jews and Poles, almost as many of the latter as of the former, but outright torture for its own end was not permitted. A field commander like Grundtz would have been reprimanded had he inst.i.tuted anything like the infamous little cell at Auschwitz, where at dusk camp officials would cram into a tiny room with one high window some sixty prisoners chosen at random, then lock the door-and expect to find forty suffocated or trampled to death by morning. There was nothing like that at Majdanek. Prisoners were inducted into the camp in an orderly fashion. Jobs were a.s.signed, such as working at the crematorium or in the shoe-repair shop, one being considered about the same as the other, and after a testing period, the strongest and ablest men were selected for work at one of the German commercial factories that had grown up around the camp perimeter in order to profit from free slave labor.

For all prisoners food rations were kept at a minimum so that disease would the more quickly finish them off; vast epidemics of various fevers and choleras swept the camp at intervals, killing six or seven thousand at a time, especially the many children who found their way into Field Five, where they were sequestered with the women. And of course, the constant regimen of ten and twelve hours of heavy labor, with less than nine hundred calories of food a day, did speed the deaths of any with even the slightest impairment. One abscessed tooth when there was no dentist and no protein to produce white corpuscles could kill a man overnight.

Szymon noticed at the gas chamber that the Zyklon-B the n.a.z.is were using was made by the German firm of Tesch & Stabenow and that what he supposed were careful instructions came with each shipment. The gas was delivered in neatly labeled cylinders bearing a bold skull and crossbones plus a verbal warning that the gas could be deadly if not used with extreme care.

He was at the gas chamber one morning, loading his flatbed with dead Jews, when a Dr. Eigenstiller, who served as traveling expert for Tesch & Stabenow, arrived to check on procedures at Majdanek and to compare their operations with those at the other camps that were the princ.i.p.al users of his company's product. He told the men supervising the chamber: 'You must keep the nozzles clean. That way you get a more even distribution of the first application, and that's important if you want an orderly procedure.'

Eigenstiller did suggest one improvement that had worked well in the other camps: 'Pack your undesirables in more closely, using about one square foot per person. Giving them three separate blasts a.s.sures you a more even distribution and doesn't waste the Zyklon-B. You'll see the advantage when you open the doors. The bodies remain upright. They can't fall down, so you'll avoid that jungle of arms and legs.'

There was one regrettable aspect of the system for which no solution had yet been found: 'When an undesirable dies of strangulation, which is what this is, technically, his bowels often empty automatically, also his bladder, and we have found no way to prevent this. It is absolutely essential therefore that you hose out the chamber after every use. After every use! Otherwise contamination builds up and any communicable germs the undesirables may have brought with them get a chance to multiply.'

On the whole, Szymon heard him reporting to the camp commander, Majdanek was doing an efficient job, and after sharing drinks and sandwiches with the SS men running the place, Eigenstiller left in a staff car to check what improvements might be needed at Treblinka.

Shortly thereafter Heinrich Himmler himself visited Majdanek, poking his fat little belly and pig-set eyes into many corners, and what he found delighted him: 'This place is beautiful! Everything works!' In his enthusiasm he announced that the Fuehrer had farreaching plans for this camp: 'It's to be enlarged tenfold. We want a quarter of a million Poles behind barbed wire, constantly replenished. We'll build a chain of factories around the perimeter to manufacture many of the goods we'll need in Germany.'

To guards like Otto Grundtz, who were encouraged by this prospect of endless employment of a congenial nature, he explained: 'Your work in such an enlarged camp will advance our program in two ways. You'll accelerate the death rate of the Polish swine. And by keeping their men away from the women during the years of normal reproduction, you'll lower the birth rate drastically. Give us twenty-five years-just twenty-five-and we'll be on our way to settling the Polish problem permanently.'

So Majdanek went its prosaic way. It would be open about three years, perhaps a thousand days, which meant that not fewer than three hundred and sixty persons had to die each twenty-four hours to maintain the standard. But it didn't really work that way, because on certain days there were unusual events which speeded the process and compensated for those days when perhaps only a hundred died.

One such event occurred shortly after Szymon's arrival. Majdanek housed many Gypsies, collected a.s.siduously from various parts of Europe, and they were housed in segregated barracks in Field Six, where they received extra rations and special privileges. Since they were excused from heavy labor, they seemed actually to prosper in camp, and this caused envy and even animosity among the other prisoners.

The reason they were so carefully nurtured was bizarre, but understandable if one accepted n.a.z.i philosophy. Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, philosopher of the party, was the son of an illiterate German shoemaker who had not been able to earn a living in Germany proper but who had done so in Estonia, where his son was born. Rosenberg's amateurish studies led him to the mystery of the European Gypsy, and he became convinced that these strange people out of Asia were a race completely apart. And what made them especially worthy of study, Rosenberg preached, was the unquestioned capacity of their women to produce healthy babies with great regularity and with some kind of immunity which defended the children against normal diseases. 'We must,' argued Rosenberg, 'determine the secret of the Gypsy woman, because then we can apply it to our German women and help them produce a master race of blond, moral, strong Nordics.' He was convinced also that Germans, Norwegians and Swedes, but no others, sprang from a race of pure Nordics who inhabited a cold Arctic continent which vanished sometime around A.D. 400, having contributed to the world the superior race that was now destined to conquer Europe and rule it justly.

He ordered any camp which contained a concentration of Gypsies to conduct interesting experiments on the women and especially their child-bearing processes, but regrettably, nothing substantial came of this, so one day in disgust he sent to centers like Majdanek a coded message which read: RESEARCH ON GYPSIES CONCLUDED. HARVEST HOME ACTION.

The telegram was delivered at Majdanek at seven in the morning, and by nine all the Gypsy quarters were vacated. Nine hundred and sixteen of these curious, talkative, gesturing people were led to a hill at the far western edge of the camp, lined up carefully-names and numbers registered-and machine-gunned.

The n.a.z.is who ran the individual fields at Majdanek did condone one practiced brutality, and since it contained an element of amus.e.m.e.nt, it was also approved by the commandant. It would occur at the close of day, when the prisoners were exhausted from their heavy labors and no food. A two-hundred-pound guard called The Dancer sometimes appeared unannounced and arbitrarily, first in this field, then in another, and in a high-pitched feminine voice, shouted at the slaves as they stood at muster before their barracks: 'Stillgestanden, Mtzen ab, Augen links!' and the captives had to stand very still, take off their caps with their left hand just so, and turn eyes and head to the left.

As they stood so, The Dancer moved down the line trying to detect any irregularity. Satisfied, he cried in that high voice: 'Mtzen auf!' and the men replaced their caps and looked straight ahead.

Then came the terrifying moment, for The Dancer now moved back, folded his arms, and inspected the men standing before him. Finally, on no selective principle that could be ascertained, he chose some prisoner, moved menacingly before him, studied him for about a minute, then with his left thumb wet with spit, marked a spot on the man's body: behind the right ear perhaps, or on the left side of the belly, low down, or directly over the heart. Twice he would indicate the target spot with his spit.

Now he showed why he carried his nickname, for he would move well away from the prisoner and begin the dancing shuffle used by prizefighters, weaving this way and that, uttering small grunts as if a true fight were in progress, licking first his left thumb, then his right, and all the time marking his target.

Finally, with a piercing scream, he would lunge forward with all his considerable force, swing his right fist with terrible power, and strike the prisoner hard on target.

Invariably the man would be knocked to the ground, for in his weakened condition there was no chance of withstanding such a blow, but this falling seemed to infuriate The Dancer, for he would stand over the prostrate prisoner and revile him in screeching tones: 'Get up, coward b.a.s.t.a.r.d Pole afraid to fight! Get up and fight like a man!'

With this he would begin to kick the fallen man, hard, heavy blows of the boot to the head and kidneys and heart, screaming for the man to get up and fight like a decent German ... like a man. And all the while he danced back and forth like a boxer.

In Field Four he had killed five men, three by kicking them to death, two by terrible blows which ruptured the heart-and the men of this field, not knowing how many others he had killed in the other areas, often felt that the most hideous sound on earth was that high-pitched cry 'Stillgestanden, Mtzen ab, Augen links!' for they knew it threatened another indecent death.

An especially gruesome aspect of The Dancer's performance was that when it became known to the guards in other fields that he was about to box, these men ran to where he was conducting his evening 'inspection,' forming a kind of cheering section and even making small wagers as to whether he would be able to kill his target with one blow. 'A clean knockout' that was called, and the watching guards applauded when he achieved it.

One evening after the usual brutal day of work, Bukowski returned to Field Four, where the guards had gathered to watch The Dancer, and found himself selected as the target, marked just below the heart with that spit-wetted left thumb. Two of the guards cheered their man on and two others arranged a bet as to whether or not Bukowski could survive the forthcoming blow. Szymon, watching the weaving shuffle as The Dancer maneuvered to attain maximum power in his right arm, prayed: Let me withstand this. Body, grow strong. And he looked The Dancer right in the eye as the guards cheered and the terrible blow fell.

He had never experienced such a paralyzing, thunderous smashing. Resistance was impossible, and he felt himself going down as if a woodsman had chopped off his legs. Don't faint! he ordered his failing body, but he could feel blackness sweeping over him. Don't faint or he'll kick you to death.

He did faint, but just for a moment. Then he felt the deadly boot crashing into his head, and surprisingly, this revived him. With a fort.i.tude he did not know he had he raised his hands, fended off the next kick, and slowly regained his feet while The Dancer screamed at him: 'Filthy f.u.c.king Pole! Why don't you stand up and fight like a man?'

One morning Bukowski arrived with a load of corpses at the crematorium, to find that no one was working inside. Eric Muhsfeldt was there, of course, as chief of the installation, but he had no helpers; Gestapo guards had appeared suddenly that morning and driven the oven workers into a small room, where Zyklon-B was released. Now, before work could begin, it was necessary to remove those bodies from the room and place them in the ovens.

Bukowski was detailed to this duty, and when he was finished, Muhsfeldt, with his triangular face, staring eyes and smiling lips, said: 'I want you to work with me now. I've been watching you, and you're very good.'

Bukowski, knowing this to be a death sentence-all in Majdanek were under that sentence, but to work in the crematorium meant that it would come hideously sooner-thought for a moment that he must protest, but he knew that if he did, Muhsfeldt could order him shot, so he temporized: 'I'd like working with you, sir, but first I must take my truck back.'

'Of course! You'll start tomorrow. I'll tell your commander.'

Szymon, trembling, drove the truck back to the gas chambers to pick up his next load of Jewish corpses, but as he waited in line he chanced to see the pile of shoes left by the doomed Jews before entering the baths. He knew that these shoes would be taken to the shoe-repair shop, where the sound ones would be mended for use in Germany, and on the spur of the moment he left his truck, a crime in itself, and went up to the officer in charge.

'May I speak, sir?'

'What is it?'

'Some of those shoes. They could be saved.'

'I know that. That's what I have my men doing.'

'I used to be a shoemaker. I could fix that shoe,' and he pointed to one almost worth salvaging.

'You could?'

'Yes. I fixed shoes that were in much worse shape than that.' Then he had a brilliant thought: 'In Poland, you know, we don't have good shoes.'

'Not like good German shoes,' the n.a.z.i said. 'Come with me.'

'My truck.'

'I'll find another driver. Drivers are plentiful. Good shoemakers, not.'

He led Szymon to a small, low concrete building outside the triple barbed wire where six emaciated camp slaves were going through the painfully slow motions of repairing shoes. With thumping heart and almost animal cunning, Szymon surveyed the work area, spotted a pair of pincers like those he had once watched his village shoemaker use, picked them up, and reaching down for one of the shoes lying on the floor, began pulling away the worn sole. When the officer's attention was diverted, Szymon whispered to the man nearest him: 'Protect me,' and that man took from the pile the mate to Szymon's shoe and began the procedures which a skilled shoemaker would follow. Szymon aped him, whereupon another man said, in the officer's hearing: 'This one knows how to fix shoes.'

He got the job, but at close of day, when he should have gone with the guards back to Field Four, he sought permission from his officer to detour to the crematorium: 'I should explain to Muhsfeldt. He would be expecting me and I would not want him to think ...'

The shoe-repair officer laughed at the idea of anyone's apologizing to a chinless wonder like Muhsfeldt, who was kept at the crematorium because he was good for nothing else, but the officer also liked Bukowski's att.i.tude, so he a.s.signed two guards to return him to his quarters via the burning place, and they watched as Szymon apologized. He did not want Muhsfeldt to harbor any grudge that might cause the angular-faced man to order his death, and the crematorium man, for his part, seemed pleased that the Pole had come to apologize.

'I could have used you,' he said, the narrow s.p.a.ce between his hairline and his eyebrows wrinkling with obvious irritation. 'But I always come last. They don't like me because I work here, but this camp couldn't function without me. We average about three hundred fifty bodies a day, and did you ever stop to think how many men it would take to dig that many graves day after day? It would bankrupt the camp.' He pointed to his five ovens, their metal work gleaming, and said: 'These are the most sensible thing in this camp.'

He was sorry to lose Bukowski: 'But around here the officers always come first. If they need you to fix shoes ...' He showed Szymon his own, which were not good.

'I'll fix them,' Szymon said, and that night he returned to Barracks Eleven certain that he had gained a few more months of life, and he was right, for ten weeks later all the crematorium crew of which he would have been a member disappeared, and Professor Tomczyk explained why: 'The n.a.z.is want no one alive who could report specific details. When surrender nears-and believe me, it will come-you watch! Then they'll shoot whoever is left here.'

Bukowski's feeling of good fortune in escaping imminent death was dampened by the decline he saw in Professor Tomczyk. As the old man grew ever weaker, he was in danger of being nominated some morning for Barracks Nineteen and accelerated death. But at morning muster, when he stood in the snow for ninety minutes, he drew upon some inner reserve whose power dumfounded Bukowski: How does he do it, that frail old man with the bruised and broken body?

Otto Grundtz, who monitored everyone in Field Four, always seeking those who could be more quickly killed off, as if to fulfill his quota, had seen Tomczyk as a likely prospect, and a.s.signed him to the great concrete rollers, two ma.s.sive cylinders with iron pipes set through their middles. They were used for smoothing the camp roads, and work on them was the cruelest that could be devised, for in cold weather prisoners, with no gloves, had to grasp the freezing iron pipes, and then summon all their energy to start the rollers forward and keep them going. It would have been murderous work for a young man consuming thirty-five hundred calories a day of fat and protein. On nine hundred calories of thin soup, it was a sure sentence of death.

But Professor Tomczyk refused to die. And he refused to be placed in Barracks Nineteen: 'I will defeat them.' And he began that series of instructions which no man who survived Barracks Eleven would ever forget. He became a professor again, urgently teaching as if he must within a limited time impart all he knew to younger men who would carry on the obligations he had a.s.sumed. In whispered discussions at night, or in casual observations to his fellows as he strained at the concrete rollers, he taught his lessons: 'The most important thing to do when this nightmare ends-and it will end-is to rebuild. Every item that they destroy, you must rebuild. Because rebuilding is an act of faith, an act of commitment to the future. If they've destroyed a schoolhouse in your village, and they've burned down many, rebuild it first of all, because a schoolhouse is a pledge to the future.

'And our beautiful buildings, if they destroy them, rebuild them, because they are testimony to the greatness we once knew. Rebuild a church or a historic palace even before you rebuild your own homes, because you've learned here that a man can live anywhere, under any conditions. Homes can wait, but the edifices which warm the civic heart can be lost if not attended to at the proper time.

'Rebuild, rebuild. And most of all, you young fellows, rebuild your own lives. Love your wives when you get home and have many children. This is not the end. Otto Grundtz is not the G.o.d who oversees the fields of Poland.

'Rebuild. Rebuild. Think now of what you will rebuild as soon as the evil ones depart. Imagine churches and palaces and schoolhouses. And most of all, imagine the children you will make, and educate, and send on their way.'

He was incessant in this teaching, a dying man who refused to die until he was sure that the spring fields had been sown with good seed.

He was really remarkable, the younger men around him thought. Sixty, seventy years old, probably weighed less than a hundred pounds, but there he stood at muster, his feet freezing in snow, and there he worked at the icy handles of the great concrete rollers, and each day it seemed that he must collapse and be moved the final distance to Barracks Nineteen. But at the next day's roll call he would report: 'Present.'

It was his opinion, in these darkest days of the war when Germany's triumph seemed universal, that two things would happen: 'Like Napoleon, Hitler will go too far into Russia, and before I die I will see his armies heading back this way. Mark my words, you young fellows, you will be liberated sooner than you know by men coming from the east. The barbed wire will be torn down. The gibbets ... [He stopped, as if he knew how close he was to those gibbets.]

'At the same time the Americans will strengthen the west. You'll see American bombers over this camp. Yes, you will see airplanes right up there. This you must never doubt. So what if the Germans have reached the Volga River? Mark their retreat. You will hear about it.'

On one point he was insistent: 'You must remember the name and look of every n.a.z.i who worked in this camp. If any of you escape, and I pray to G.o.d you will, first thing you do is not eat a big meal or visit your wife. First thing, you get someone to write down all the names. Karl Otto Koch, who came here from Buchenwald. Max Koegel, who was our commandant, and Hermann Florstedt, if I have his name right. And Otto Grundtz, who commanded Field Four, and don't forget the medical doctor, Heinrich Rindfleisch. Promise me to record Otto Grundtz, the worst of them all. And find out the name of The Dancer.

'Because when liberation comes you must see that these men are brought back here to Majdanek and hanged. They must be hanged from the very gibbets they profaned. Because they did not profane me, or harmless Jakub Grabski, whom they hanged last week. They profaned the human race, and the memory of Jesus Christ, and the souls of the little children they have ma.s.sacred in Field Five. For this terrible crime of profanation of all that is good in life, they must be hanged. You must commit yourselves not to revenge but to the service as G.o.d's exemplars here on earth. These men have profaned G.o.d, and they must be punished.'

Until word of what Professor Tomczyk, this walking ghost, was doing reached the ears of Otto Grundtz, he merely continued to observe the old man, noticing that each day he seemed feebler. But his head was still held high and the sunken eyes still flamed. He had seen phenomena like this before in Field Four; the average Pole was a pathetic thing, a subhuman type who wilted in adversity and did not resist being dragged off to Barracks Nineteen. With no food at all, the man would just stay asleep, comatose one day, dead the next-and no harm done. But a few men, sensing death upon them, seemed to pour all their energy into their hearts, and their eyes and their voices. These men died on their feet; he concluded that in some devious way they must have got German blood into their life systems. Perhaps in centuries past, some German warrior had come this way, leaving his precious seed, which had continued uncorrupted; he could imagine no other explanation for the behavior of men like this Tomczyk.

Once he satisfied himself that the old professor was spreading lies and cultivating anti-German att.i.tudes, he knew that he must be stamped out, so on one cold morning after the inspection was finished he directed his guards to bring Tomczyk to the headquarters of Field Four, the small stone house outside the fences, and there he interrogated him. 'What is your purpose in disseminating lies about the Third Reich?' he began, and to his amazement the old man collapsed and cringed like a frightened child. He wept, he pleaded, he threw himself upon the mercy of the commander, and whatever Grundtz proposed, no matter how contrary to what he had been preaching to the men in the barracks, Tomczyk agreed.

'Poland is a fifth-cla.s.s nation not worth preservation.'

Tomczyk nodded.

'It is Germany's destiny to bring order to the east.'

Tomczyk nodded.

'A superior race must under G.o.d's will subdue and rule an inferior.'

Tomczyk agreed.

And slowly, as Grundtz continued, laying bare his soul and identifying the drives which motivated him and justified him in slaughtering hundreds and thousands, he began to realize that this man was making a fool of him, leading him on, encouraging him to divulge the horrible sickness in his soul.

In the end Grundtz was screaming at Tomczyk, who stood placidly agreeing with everything: 'You are laughing at me. You've been tricking me. You don't believe a word of what I've been saying.' With a mighty blow, he knocked him clear across the room, then pulled him to his feet and began hitting him about the face and head, but Tomczyk did not stop smiling, and agreeing, and nodding whenever he had a chance to control his head.

Exhausted and somewhat ashamed of having lost his temper with such an old fool, Grundtz smoothed down his rumpled uniform, resumed his seat at his desk, and looked up at the old man who, miraculously, was still able to stand. 'I know what you really think. You think the Russians will drive us back one day. You think the American bombers will destroy Germany. That's what you think, isn't it?'

'No,' Tomczyk lied, 'that's what you think.'

Now real screaming began, real hammering punishment, until Tomczyk's face was distorted and knocked sideways. When at last he fell unconscious, Grundtz shouted for his a.s.sistants: 'I want every Pole and every Jew in Field Four in formation at the gallows, now!' When the men said that some were working outside the fences, he shouted: 'Get them!'

So a guard ran to the shoe-repair shop and brought the two Field Four men who worked there back to the gibbet, and the squared lines were formed, and the little white stool on which the condemned man would take his last stand was put in place. The prisoners were confused as to what was happening, for there had never before been a hanging except at morning muster, but here came Otto Grundtz with three guards who were half-carrying the victim, and voices whispered in hushed affection: 'It's the old man.'