The Last Night At Auschwitz

CHAPTER I | A VOYAGE INTO THE UNKNOWN-1

CHAPTER I

A VOYAGE INTO THE UNKNOWN

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The arrival at Auschwitz, approx. 1944. From here, the ones selected were heading straight for the gas chambers, especially the women, the elderly and the children.

‘Mister Severin, I reckon we won’t get out of this alive, will we?’ said the little guy.

I watched him somehow dispassionately, as much as I could see of him, buried as he was among thick woolen overcoats and fur hats. It seemed unbelievable that after so many days spent there, down below, in that pestilent air, the little guy was still alive. His thin face was shrouded by a long, curly beard, which only revealed the glimmer of his moist, dark eyes. He had a terrible cough, and, at times, he would bend to spit on the floor, jostling us all with his elbows.

It was the second time he was asking me that question during the past hour, and that was after all the other people around him had ceased answering days before. I looked up at the wagon’s wooden ceiling again, for the thousandth time perhaps, and concentrated on its warped veins and knots, trying to find some pattern, some hidden meaning, a story that could keep my interest alive and help me escape from the hell in which I was cast, like in a cement block. It was my little game that I’d been practicing obsessively for days in a row, each time trying to give it new touches, new interpretations.

I had lost track of time along with the watch that German soldier had ripped off my wrist, grinning widely, when he pushed me into the wagon, back in Vienna. ‘Courtesy of Adolf Eichmann . . .!’ he had exclaimed, excitedly, turning it around in the morning light, making it shine. “Congratulations on your 40th anniversary ... errr ... from your loving wife, Elsa, and the children Frida and Marcel”, he slowly spelled the engraved letters through his rotten teeth. I was convinced it was the longest phrase he had read in his life. He frowned at me, as if he’d just realized that I was a human being just like him, with a family and kids, and that made him feel bad. ‘Move, scumbag . . .!’ he gritted out, shoved the watch into his pocket and hurled me inside the wagon. I heard him yelling out of his mind at the next prisoners, barking pointless orders, probably only to ease his conscience.

Another reference point on the axis of time was the moment when one of the prisoners, who kept their eyes glued to a crack in the wagon’s planks, shouted happily, in the tone that Howard Carter probably used when he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922: ‘Brno! We passed the station, but we’re not slowing down . . .! We’re in Czechoslovakia . . .!’, briefly animating the discussions that helped them kill time, as they were forced to stay crammed together, faces touching, breathing one another’s oxygen-deficient air.

‘I wonder how many cattle have been transported in this wagon . . .?’ I found myself asking aloud, my eyes fixed on a tiny hole above my head, where the knot in a plank was missing. You could see the late-autumn ashen clouds through it.

No one minded me, so I resumed my crazy reasoning on my own. This wagon could hold about thirty animals, on their way to the slaughterhouse. Once they reached their destination, they were most likely carefully unloaded, to avoid any unwanted fractures, then led in a single file towards the building that smelled faintly of death and burned meat. By means of quick, expert strokes, the animals would have their necks slashed with a long blade knife, leaving them there to die in their own blood, fighting for a last breath of air that would never come. Their bodies still warm, their minds locked in the sleep that usually precedes death, the animals would be then transported on mobile belts to the chopping room, where axes, milling machines and knives would tear their bodies apart. And the brain, its cells still alive, screaming its pain, would be torn out of the skull, packed in metal boxes, and thrown into industrial fridges. This wagon was displaying the evidence of thousands of such gruesome little stories: scattered strands of hair, a crack where a horse’s hoof had hit the wagon’s plank, a trace of dry blood about seven feet up.

‘Mister Severin, will we get out of this affair alive?’ the little guy asked again, interrupting my somber reflection.

I remembered that the little guy once told us that he used to own a bakery in Mariahilferstrasse, in Vienna, which made him see everything – including his own existence – as a business, good or bad, ‘as the good Lord wills’, he used to say.

During the first days, he had told us all how he used to make warm bagels with poppy and sesame seeds and ‘even sunflower, provided they were fresh, delicious, well-baked and crunchy . . .’ Tourism was flourishing after the Great War and Joachim’s business was going like clockwork, despite the financial crisis that had befallen Europe. ‘Listen to me, crisis or not, there are three golden rules, which I have always abided by: location, location, and ... again location! Never invest in outlying areas, in poor workers’ districts or in small towns, this is what my father told me, when he was alive, the poor soul...! Ahhh ... if he could see me here ... I think sorrow would break his heart into pieces...’

The little guy, Joachim by his real name, had kept on talking, not taking any notice of his neighbors’ long stares, as they were increasingly starving. He wouldn’t stop talking, not even when they asked him to, he insisted on reminding them of warm bagels and apple pies fresh from the oven even when they nudged him, overstraining his frail ribs. It was probably the way he could escape that filthy hell and relive the good times of his existence, when daily life was interwoven with the hope for a future, as it is for all sane people. At last, a math teacher, out of his mind with hunger, punched him in the mouth and the little guy’s face filled with blood at once. The punch caught him right when he was describing his technique for wrapping wieners in flaky pastry, and his lips smashed against his teeth, cracking like overripe grapes. Joachim went silent, but during the next hours he cried his despair in his palms, as we should all have done, but for some reason were ashamed to ... or maybe we were afraid that on the other side of the door only madness awaited. We were uselessly trying to keep the appearance of some normality, of some form of civilization, in this dreadful place. For years on end, Nazi soldiers and politicians have been calling us sub-human, animals, and this probably motivated us to keep calm and detached at times like these, maybe to spite them, or maybe because there was no alternative, I really have no idea!

The physics professor, a once imposing gentleman with the intense look of a thoroughbred intellectual – now weak and shriveled – looked up at me with a desperate expression:

‘You are a historian, sir ... have you ever encountered something like this in your reading and studies?! Such hatred directed by man against his own kind?’

Of course, I could have asked him the same question regarding his specialty, but I had sufficient knowledge of the universe to reflect on this subject by myself. After all, at the same moment we were being transported in a cattle wagon towards an unknown but predictable destination, planet Earth was spinning through space orbiting the Sun as it had probably done for the past four billion years, undisturbed. On Mercury, volcanoes went on spitting out their metal and molten rock content, while on Mars some red dust blizzard went on carving the ancient rocks, flattening them down.

Beyond the frozen boundaries of our solar system, where the utter silence of inorganic cosmic space reigned, enquiring looks could behold the starry sky of the Milky Way, the galaxy to which the cattle wagon, the dead and the living in it somehow belonged. But beyond it there were billions and billions of other galaxies, an infinity impervious to the sufferings of Joachim or the famished and dehydrated physics professor, impervious to the damned politics, nationalism, demagogy, naïve voters and racial hatred that had made this g******e possible!

‘Oh, yees, mister Morritz,’ I answered sulkily. ‘Unfortunately, human history is littered with countless acts of g******e, as it seems it is deeply embedded in human nature itself. If evolutionism needed one more proof regarding our modest origin, it would undoubtedly be man’s criminal behavior towards his own kind. The will to kill lies dormant within us, like a lethal microorganism, waiting for the opportunity to come out. This virus is usually complacently hidden within the great masses of uneducated individuals, semi-literate or illiterate, mentally retarded individuals bordering on the animal condition because they do not know their history, they cannot reason with their own intellect, they don’t even have the experience of life, and the reality that they see before their eyes is to them the only one that has ever existed and that will ever exist! Well, these blind and hungry masses – because the triggering element is usually an economic crisis, or a crisis of social consciousness – are ready to follow as far as hell the herder that inevitably rises in its midst, the savior that will say the exact words they want to hear... They’ll follow him like a flock of sheep stepping behind the donkey ... only in this case the flock only leaves death and despair behind.’

My gaze unwittingly slid towards little Joachim’s face, who was watching me with big, moist eyes, without giving any sign that he had understood my words. The blood had meanwhile dried on his face, forehead and cheeks, where he had smeared it with his coat sleeve.

Mister Morritz motioned me to go on.

‘An interesting example, that has always fascinated me, is that of the crusades. The fact that the gentry had willfully abandoned their wealth and plentiful lifestyle in Western Europe to endure enormous suffering through the deserts and winters of Syria, with the declared purpose of “freeing” Jerusalem from a chimera, constitutes a research subject in itself, in the fields of philosophy and history as well as behavioral psychology. The way in which they unleashed their atavistic drives the moment the troupes led by Godefroy de Bouillon clambered over the city’s defense walls during the summer of 1099 surpasses our feeble imagination by far. They put the entire population to the sword, regardless of cult or ethnicity, age or gender, because they were too exalted and furious to stop and listen to supplications. The Arab chroniclers, as well as the European ones, speak of the fact that these liberator “saints” were up to their ankles in blood...! After they were done slaughtering, the leaders of the crusade crawled up the Golgotha hill and to the Holy Sepulcher on their knees, crying and uttering fervent prayers to God.’

Mister Morritz shook his head bitterly, while Joachim kept on blinking with a dumb, vacant air.

‘Mister Severin, that is precisely the reason why history didn’t appeal to me, too much death, it seems that ever since the dawn of times man has constantly strived to find plausible reasons to kill. The fight for territory, this Lebensraum, as Nazi politicians call it today, the fight for power, the fight for religious ideas, for resources or for getting their hands on other men’s women, all these are just excuses, pretexts to kill your own kind. It’s human nature itself, sir, just as you mentioned earlier. Well, I took refuge in physics, here the fight is against dead matter, against the organic substance that constitutes the basis of life itself, against a piece of carbon! I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that I could spend my whole life studying the atom, its components and the laws that animate the entire universe!’