Prisoner B-3087 (17 page)

buchenwald concentratIon camp. Just the
looks on the faces of the prisoners already there told
me all I needed to know. They were scared. Wideeyed. And not just at roll call, or when a
kapo
passed
by. It was all the time, like at any moment death might
come for you. And at Buchenwald, as I was to learn,
death came in many guises.

After our first roll call, I was assigned to the stone
quarry. Instead of breaking rocks, I was told to carry
them up a long hill. I had to carry the big rocks on my
back, with my arms behind me to hold them in place.
If you took a stone too large, you would drop it and
the Nazis would shoot you. If you took a stone too
small, the Nazis would shoot you for being lazy.
Picking just the right size stone became a kind of competition among us. Another fine joke from the Nazis.

Some of the prisoners pulled carts instead of carrying stones on their backs, but that wasn’t a job you
wanted either. The Jews were chained to the carts like
a team of draught horses and whipped like animals.
Only these animals were also required to sing. The
Germans called them their singing horses. They had
to carry a tune as they hauled enormous loads of rock
up the hill. I had already been part of the prisoner
chorus at Sachsenhausen. I was grateful I didn’t have
to do it strapped to a horse cart here.

It was only at our second roll call of the day that I
saw the Buchenwald zoo.
I had seen the fenced-in area at the first roll call,
but not the animals. There were deer, monkeys,
even bears— bears!— right there in the concentration camp.
The zoo, I learned, was the idea of the camp’s
commandant, Karl Koch, and his wife, Ilse. The commandant had built it so his guards and their families
would have something to entertain them. We starving
prisoners stood at attention, with our hunched shoulders and gaunt faces and oversized, filthy clothes,
while healthy, well-fed children and their mothers
came to see the animals. The little girls wore pretty
dresses and shiny black shoes and ribbons in their
hair. The little boys wore shorts and jackets and caps,
just as I used to. Sometimes they sucked on lollipops,
watching us the way they watched the animals. What
were they thinking, those little German children? Did
they see animals when they looked at us, or people? I
wasn’t so sure myself anymore.
The bears in the zoo were fed better than the prisoners. At roll call, we’d watch as big bloody steaks
were fed to the bears. I was so hungry I would have
fought one of the bears for that meat and eaten it
raw — steak
and
bear. One day the Nazis gave two
prisoners the chance. They dropped a piece of raw
meat in the mud between two men and told them to
fight for it, and they did. The SS officers laughed at
them and hit them with clubs while the Jews scrambled in the mud for their dinner. The animals in the
zoo were never treated so badly.
The camp’s commandant was a brutal man, but his
wife was worse. Prisoners called her The Witch of
Buchenwald and The Beast of Buchenwald, and much
worse. As with Amon Goeth years before — years! —
I did my best to stay away from both Herr and
Frau Koch.
One day at roll call, the Witch of Buchenwald
walked up and down the rows of prisoners with one of
the SS guards. She came to me, checked the number
tattooed on my arm, and moved to the next prisoner.
She read the number tattooed on his arm and checked
it against a list on a clipboard the soldier carried.
“You,” she said to the prisoner. “I am told you have
another tattoo.”
The prisoner nodded nervously.
“Show it to me,” Ilse Koch said.
The man pulled his sleeve up his thin, bony arm to
show her a faded tattoo of a crescent moon.
“Yes,” the witch said. “Very nice. Mark him
down,” she told the soldier. He made a note on his
clipboard.
When they were gone, I heard the man beside me
give a little whimper, like he was trying not to cry.
What difference did it make that he had a tattoo? Why
had it made the Witch of Buchenwald single him out?
He must have been asking himself the same questions.
All that mattered was that he was on the Witch’s list.
He had been noticed, and surviving meant never being
noticed by the Nazis. After the roll call, I never saw
the man with the other tattoo again.
One day I was washing myself at the camp water
pump, part of my daily ritual, when I saw two SS officers lure a deer to the fence of their enclosure in the
zoo. It was a sleek animal, with tall, broad antlers.
While it nibbled at the food one of them offered, the
other officer tied its antlers to the fence with a leather
strap. The buck only discovered that it was caught
when it tried to pull away. It snorted and stamped and
whipped its head back and forth, trying to pull itself
free, but it was trapped. The SS officers laughed at it
and taunted it, and left it tied to the fence.
I had seen the Nazis do terrible things. Inhumane,
unimaginably cruel things, and I had started to
become numb. But somehow seeing that deer there
thrashing around, trying to free itself from the fence,
made my blood boil. I wanted to run over and untie it,
to set it free, but I couldn’t. There were too many other
German soldiers around. If they saw me near the zoo
I’d be shot.
So I turned my back on him. I left the buck tied to
the fence. As much as I wanted to help him, I had
to look out for myself.
At roll call that night, the two SS officers who had
tied up the deer were pulled off duty by the commandant. Word of what they had done had gotten back to
Koch, and he berated them in German. Their zoo
privileges were taken away, and they were not allowed
to watch films in the camp movie theater for three
months.
Cruelty to prisoners the Nazis could abide. But not

At roll call a few days later, they told us we were being
moved again. Gross-Rosen needed workers, and there
were no new shipments of prisoners coming in from
the countryside. The prisoners in the camps would
be reassigned from now on as each camp needed
workers.