Prisoner B-3087 (11 page)

after the shower, nothInG seemed to mat
ter as much to me. I knew it was a game to the
Nazis — kill us, don’t kill us, to them it didn’t really
matter — but even so, I was glad I had made it through.

I had been ready to die. But when water came out of
those showers, not gas, it was like I was born again. I
had survived, and I would keep surviving.

I was alive.
The Nazis lined us up, still naked and shivering.
First they shaved our heads. With our hair gone, we all
looked alike — young and old. Next they marched us
to a different room, where soldiers waited at tables
with what looked like big oversized pencils with wires
attached to them. As we worked our way toward
them, person after person, I could hear screams of
pain ahead of us. I had no idea what they were doing
to us, but they weren’t killing us. That was all that
mattered, I told myself. I could handle pain.
By the time I got to the head of the line, I understood what was happening. We were being tattooed. I
watched as the man ahead of me had letters and numbers carved into his skin in black ink with an electric
needle. When it was my turn, the Nazi with the tattoo
pencil grabbed my arm and started to write. The pain
was awful as he dragged the vibrating needle over my
skin, but I knew better than to cry out or beg him to
stop. Besides, nothing could be worse than what had
already happened to me. I had been in a gas chamber.
I had looked up into a showerhead and waited for
death to come, and it had passed me by. I was
alive
. A
tattoo was nothing to me. Not in that moment.
B-3087.
That’s what the Nazis carved into my skin.
B
for
Birkenau
,
3087
for my prisoner number. That was the
mark they put on me, a mark I would have for as long
as I lived. B-3087. That was who I was to them. Not
Yanek Gruener, son of Oskar and Mina. Not Yanek
Gruener of 20 Krakusa Street, Podgórze, Kraków.
Not Yanek Gruener who loved books and science and
American movies.
I was Prisoner B-3087.
But I was
alive
.
After the room where we were tattooed, we were
taken to another room with a huge pile of old used
prisoner uniforms, and told to find something that fit.
The soldiers made us run, beating us with clubs if we
took too long to find new pants and a shirt, so we took
whatever we could as fast as we could. I ended up with
pants that were too short and a shirt that was too big,
but I was lucky to get a pair of wooden shoes that fit.
That was important. Shoes were everything in the
camps. I moved fast and wasn’t beaten. I could play
the game as well as anybody. I had made it this far,
hadn’t I? I was alive.
When we were showered and tattooed and dressed
again, we were taken to our new barracks. They were
worse than any barracks I’d seen yet. The ground at
Birkenau was like a swamp, wet and thick with mud,
and there were no floors in the barracks. There was no
heat or electric light either. The bunks weren’t beds but
shelves, stacked three tall on top of one another, and
they stuffed us in again as they had on the trains. There
were no mattresses, no pillows, no blankets. Just old,
wet straw, when there was anything at all. There were
so many of us we could only all lie one direction or we
couldn’t lie down at all. It didn’t matter. I was alive.
I couldn’t help thinking it over and over again.
I felt something at my feet, deep inside the shelf, and
I reached down to get it. It was a scrap of colorful cloth,
a bandanna or a handkerchief, probably left there by
one of the gypsies who’d slept in these bunks before
us. I tucked the scrap up under my head, hoping to use
it as a bit of pillow against my ear, but there was something hard inside it. I unknotted the cloth and found
an object hidden within: a little wooden horse. It was a
simple children’s toy, a rough carving that just hinted
at four legs and a head, but it was smooth and dark like
it had been played with. Some gypsy boy or girl had
loved this horse. Had somehow kept it with them
always, right up until the very end. Had they known
they were going to die? Had they left their little horse
behind so it wouldn’t die with them? So some part of
them might survive and be remembered?
“We have a boy who is thirteen today,” a man on
my shelf said. I raised my head, as did one or two others. “Who will stand with him?”
No one stirred.
“Are there not ten men here who will make a minyan with us?”
“Be quiet,” someone told him. “Go to sleep.”
“How can you care about such things in a place like
this?” someone else asked.
“It is even more important here and now,” the
man said.
Someone scoffed. “Tomorrow he will be dead. We
all will. None of it matters anymore.”
I was tired, and starving, and my arm burned from
the tattoo. But suddenly I thought standing in a minyan for somebody’s bar mitzvah was the most
important thing in the word. Worth losing sleep over.
Worth being punished or killed.
“I’ll do it,” I said. The men around me were quiet
for a minute after I spoke, and then someone else said
yes. And another. And another. When there were ten
of us, we climbed down onto the muddy floor, and the
man who had first spoken began to pray. More men
came down then, more than ten, until we filled the
whole ground. The boy looked so young, but I knew I
could only be one or two years older than he was.
With a start, I realized I had probably missed my own
birthday. I was fifteen now, maybe even sixteen. It was
winter, but I had no idea what month it was, let alone
what day. I had been in concentration camps more
than two years. I looked at the boy and remembered
my own hasty bar mitzvah in Kraków. I had been so
young then, a lifetime ago.
The ceremony was fast so we wouldn’t be caught.
When it was over, the men all whispered “Mazel tov”
and climbed back onto their shelves. I went up to the
boy and pressed the wooden horse into his hands,
the only present I could give him. The boy looked at
me with big, round eyes. Had I ever been so young?
“We are alive,” I told him. “We are alive, and that is
all that matters. We cannot let them tear us from the
pages of the world.”
I said it as much for me as for him. I said it in memory
of Uncle Moshe, and my mother and father, and my
aunts and other uncles and cousins. The Nazis had put
me in a gas chamber. I had thought I was dead, but I was
alive. I was a new man that day, just like the bar mitzvah
boy. I was a new man, and I was going to
survive
.

I stood at the water pump, scrubbInG my
body. It was bitterly cold out, but I didn’t care. I would
scrub my body, I decided, each and every morning, no
matter how cold it was, no matter how tired I was. I
was alive, and I meant to stay that way.

We had no soap, but at least I was able to wash away
the caking dirt of Birkenau. I paid careful attention to
where I had been tattooed. Too many others had let
their tattoos get infected, and that had taken them to
the camp surgeon. You didn’t want to go to the camp
surgeon. Ever. I even rubbed my teeth with my wet
fingers— we had no toothbrushes or toothpaste, of
course, but it felt important to remember what it was
like to be human.

As I scrubbed the taint of Birkenau from my body,
I read the signs the Nazis had posted above the water
pump:
“The block is your home: Maintain cleanliness!”
and
“One louse — your death!”
Big jokers, the
Nazis. You could play by the rules, keep yourself
clean, do everything right, and still the Nazis would
kill you for looking at them wrong. But I played
the game.

Work at Birkenau was as bad as everywhere else.
Here, as in Plaszów, we were to build new barracks.
The ground for the new section was so big it would
double the size of the camp when it was finished. The
Nazis called the new camp B III, but we prisoners
called it Mexico. I don’t know where the name started,
but Mexico always sounded exotic to me. Warm and
sunny, with beaches and laughing faces. Maybe that’s
why the prisoners nicknamed it Mexico. To make
them think of something very different from what B
III really was. The camp storehouse, where the Nazis
kept all the valuables the Jews from towns and villages brought with them when they first arrived, we
called Canada. Food was weak coffee substitute in the
morning, watery soup at lunch, and bread at night.
The bread was hard and tasteless and had to serve as
breakfast as well. The soup was tepid, and you were
lucky if there was a limp potato floating in it. I learned
a trick with the soup, which was to wait awhile before
lining up for it. The heavier parts of the soup sank to
the bottom. If you were among the last in line, your
soup was thicker. I almost always got some chunk in
my soup by holding back until the end. Just that little
bit of extra food might keep me from becoming a
Muselmann.

We were forbidden to go out at night, so instead of
the camp latrines we had to use a barrel in the barrack
if we had to go to the bathroom. There were two barrels for five hundred people, so we learned to go to the
latrines during the day as much as we could. There
was one latrine per prison block — really just a row of
holes cut in boards that sat over the cesspit. Prisoners
stood guard at the door with clocks. Their job was to
make sure no prisoner spent more than two minutes
in the latrine. If you took longer than that, an SS guard
would go in and beat you with a club until you were
finished and left. There was to be no dawdling at
Birkenau.

The joke was on the Germans this time though. By
leaving the same prisoners stationed at the latrine, the
one place we all had to go throughout the day, they
gave us secret postmen. The Nazis never wanted us to
talk to one another, but if ever you had a message for
someone else, you could whisper it to the prisoner on
watch at the latrine door as you went in. He would
remember it, and quietly whisper it to the recipient when he came to take care of his business later
that day.

One day as I went into the latrine with another prisoner, I heard the watchman whisper, “Tonight.” I
didn’t know what the message meant, but it wasn’t for
me anyway.

That night I was fast asleep on my shelf, slotted in
with all the other prisoners in my barrack when shouts
startled me out of my sleep.
Kapo
s and SS guards were
in the barracks, yelling at us to get up and smacking at
prisoners with their clubs. I blinked, disoriented and
scared, but I managed to tumble off of my shelf. This
was something new for Birkenau, where usually they
let us at least sleep through the night.

We quickly assembled in the yard, standing in rows,
and I could tell immediately that something was
wrong. The floodlights in the towers weren’t sliding
lazily over the grounds like usual. They were turned
outside, where they swept the woods quickly, back
and forth. Guard dogs barked beyond the barbed-wire
fence surrounding the camp, and cars and tanks rolled
by outside.

A prison break! Who? How? My heart thumped in
my chest. I wished I was with them, whoever they were,
running for the forest, the hills — anywhere but here.

Get out
, I prayed for them.
Get away. Fly.
A Nazi came around, checking our numbers against
a clipboard. There were always prisoners who couldn’t
get out of bed again, who had become Muselmanners.
That’s what the Nazis wanted, anyway, to kill us with
work and starvation. But which of the missing prisoners were dying back in the barracks, and which of
them were running free in the woods?
The Nazi grabbed my hand and read the number on
my arm, then moved off to the next prisoner. My wrist
still hurt where he’d grabbed me, his grip was so tight.
The Nazis were mad. Prisoners weren’t supposed to
stand up for themselves. Prisoners weren’t supposed
to escape.
Will they make it out? Where will they go if they do?
Could I escape from Birkenau too?
I wondered. Could

I live in the woods eating berries and nuts, sleeping
out in the cold? It couldn’t be worse than the camps,
and maybe not every Pole was like the awful boys
throwing snowballs at the train station. Maybe some
sympathetic Pole would take me in, hide me in
their barn.

We stood for hours, late into the night. They even
went through the roll call again, as though some of us
might have slipped off in between, which didn’t seem
possible. Then, almost at dawn, there were shouts of
excitement from the Nazis beyond the fence. The gates
were opened, and a ragged bunch of prisoners were
marched back inside, all beaten and bloodied. I immediately felt sick to my stomach and swayed on my feet.

The escaped prisoners hadn’t made it. They’d been
caught. How, I didn’t know, and how many had run
and how many they’d caught I didn’t know either. But
these men hadn’t made it, and the price would be severe.

The SS officer of the watch sneered at us. “There is
no escape from Birkenau!” he cried. “No escape! Perhaps some of you are thinking about running. There
is no one waiting to help you on the outside. There is
nowhere for you to hide. You will be caught! And here
is what we do to those who try to escape!”
They lined the men up against a wall in the assembly yard.
Rat-tat-tat-tat!
The watch officer gunned
them down himself, riddling their bodies with
bullets.

“Bring forward their work detail!” the guard cried.
Other men were pulled out of the ranks — prisoners
who had done nothing but work alongside the men
who’d run, prisoners who hadn’t tried to escape.

Rat-tat-tat-tat!
The SS man shot them too. Then
the solider turned the gun on us in the roll call ranks.
Rat-tat-tat
-
tat!
I closed my eyes and prayed the bullets wouldn’t find me, trembling as prisoners were hit
and fell dead to the ground all around me. I couldn’t
move though. I couldn’t run. If I flinched, I would be
singled out and shot.

“This is the punishment for escape! All of you will
share the blame!” the watch officer yelled. He shot until
the machine gun ran out of bullets.
Click-click-click.

The SS officer threw his weapon to the ground.
“Clean up this mess,” he ordered, and he marched
away, leaving us to carry away our own dead.