Four Scraps of Bread Read online

  I was not yet sixteen when I saw the face of man turn into that of a wild animal. Once the social norms were broken, for a morsel of bread we were no longer recognizable: we could crush our fellow human beings without a second thought.

  Lying on my bed in Auschwitz, I saw a woman deep in prayer. A scrap of bread fell out of her pocket. A fellow sufferer sidled up to her and grabbed that piece of bread, which represented life itself. I was amazed at such a sight. But I too coveted that piece of bread.

  I knew people who bore such destitution with magnanimity. They knew how to maintain a generous heart, and eyes full of light and concern. Stripped of absolutely everything, in a state of non-being where today, yesterday, and tomorrow were mere abstractions, their witness brought humanity back to its true stature. For those of us who were lucky enough to know them at that time, their witness allowed us to rediscover a taste for life and hope.

  THE GERMAN SHEPHERD

  I was dragging around both my clogs and a huge obsession: to become a German shepherd.

  They were truly beautiful animals, with their glossy coats, bright eyes, and sharp teeth. They were spoken to like they were people. They were entitled to smiles and games, and their meals were guaranteed. Thousands of us men and women envied their fate.

  These dogs were not gentle with the prisoners, yet I was never scared of them. I looked at each one of them lovingly, and wondered which one of them put up with my all my playfulness and cuddles when I was younger. Never was I bitten.

  One day one of them was cheeky enough to disobey its master: it rubbed against my leg without hurting me. Could the animal feel my affection?

  This sensation, buried deep at the time, and its encounter with my numbed heart, remain vivid in my memory.

  THIRST

  The distribution of soup and drinks at Birkenau6 was so disorganized that when it came my turn to offer up my metal bowl, there was nothing left.

  I had not drunk for several days. I was thirsty: my lips were full of cracks, my tongue was swollen, and my senses were completely numbed. I would have thrown myself into the next puddle if my companions had not been there to stop me. Your pupils dilate, your eyes grow wild—people think you have gone crazy.

  I must have drifted into unconsciousness, since all I can remember is the sensation of life coming back to me.

  I felt drops of water. Where were they coming from? I only found out later. Other prisoners whom I did not know came to my aid, performing miracles just in time to save me. They have no names or faces in my memory. I do not know if they are alive or dead. I know that I owe my life to them.

  I saw other prisoners dying from dehydration.

  One time, I knocked into one of these almost dead skeletons without realizing it at first. They felt the bump and moved their leg. That is a painful memory. I could not save them: it was too late. As for me, I had been lucky once again.

  EDWIGE

  Edwige was a former Auschwitz deportee turned block commandant.

  I can still feel her whip cutting into my body, and her powerful slaps. I can still hear her hateful insults: “Hurry up and die.” “Pity is a crime.” “You are nothing but useless mouths.” “Kindness is futile.” “We are all enemies.”

  Cries of pain, groans, and our exhausted silences irritated her and made her beat us harder. Older faces were particular grounds for cruelty: “You are stealing bread from the young ones!” she would yell. “Why is it taking you so long to die?” I saw prisoners collapse at her feet; she would kick them to death or finish them off with the riding crop.

  She played the game of death so casually, more concerned with taking care of herself, and dressing up in all that she had stolen.

  She gave out hot tea in the mornings with one hand, and randomly hit us with the other, yelling to try to get silence and minimize the chaos. She dished out only just enough to fill the bottom of our cups and used what was left in the huge kettle to do her ablutions in front of us.

  At the end of a long day, there she stood at the door of the barracks, clean, fresh, and wearing a new outfit that she had traded our bread for. How many paid with their lives to fill Edwige’s wardrobe?

  It took me thirty years to remember Edwige’s face. Spring has come back to my heart because I can now talk about her without being overwhelmed by a mudslide of hatred. She was the daily temptation to despair. She was the one among us who had been trained to be just like our executioners. But how could I forget the painful deaths of my fellow prisoners? How could I forgive her look of contempt and her cruel laughter at seeing that we had lost everything?

  What became of her? I have no idea, but I know that for me she remains a troubling mystery.

  MY BLANKET

  My blanket is a loving clown with a face whose color has drained away.

  On good days

  It serves as a pantry:

  stolen beetroots and jams

  armies of vermin

  swarming all over them

  leaving brightly colored streaks.

  With wounds in our flesh we gouge out

  a path for senseless convoys.

  At night, exhausted,

  I wrap myself up in its worn-out warmth

  as if to forget.

  It also whispers to me in its threadbare voice:

  “Chin up!

  You have to carry on.

  You are not allowed to weaken.

  Feelings kill, don’t forget that!”

  You have to allow yourself one certainty:

  that this nightmare will end.

  Even if believing on your own is difficult.

  Through its

  gray, stained, moth-eaten face

  I see circles of plain sky,

  often black.

  Sometimes full of stars,

  if I want to push my luck.

  And with the wings of my broken dreams,

  I hold the blanket tight.

  Then I think of nothing.

  HOW?

  I was too young, and I did not understand why we were condemned to death.

  What were we guilty of?

  I did not understand how people changed so much: some became executioners, others became victims.

  How was that possible?

  How could we have been forgotten by humanity? How could it be that no one took an interest in us, except for our torturers?

  We would scoop up random scraps of newspapers and secretly devour their words, searching for a message for us.

  How was it that we never got anything?

  Thousands of lives were stolen before my very eyes, and I plodded on, unable to see any other way out.

  Against an unhearing and unspeaking heaven, our tears became gray clouds, heavy with anger and fear.

  How was that possible?

  There were also those who had a look of hope. Those looks helped me to keep going.

  Today I live, think, and with difficulty I write, because the more I think, the less easy it is for me to answer all these questions.

  THE CALL

  The goal of our overzealous guards was to make us disappear, albeit cleanly. Hence they dedicated themselves to showering us, depersonalizing us, shaving us, and disinfecting us, on average once a month.

  They also wanted to know exactly what they were doing and therefore counted us often. This they did with imagination and care. It all depended on their mood. A sudden yearning for precision, and there we were, outside, in rows of five, at any moment of the day or night.

  Four of them took turns counting us, and they checked each other’s work. They took as long as necessary to make their numbers tally. Neither sun, nor rain, nor ice put them off. They were pernickety in fulfilling their duty and performed it with an iron discipline. If they thought they were missing someone, to make things easier, they could just erase hundreds of numbers. The unfortunate absentee was often found already dead. We stood there waiting.

  Amid the bustle of dogs, whips, and guards, we waited, tired of being so
important. It was with powerless rage that we observed the addition and subtraction of thousands of these muddled numbers.

  We often found ourselves being awakened in the middle of the night with yells accompanied by cracks of the whip. The whips had big personalities. They made themselves heard both vigorously and rigorously. Their handlers stamped their image on them. There was no point in trying to understand these outbursts. It was simply a pressing need to express their strength, their virility, and their importance.

  That morning, once more, the warmthless sun rose. We exchanged a look of hope with those of our sisters who were still standing. A pale sky, a round cloud, a drop of water caught on the tip of our tongue, and we were still alive.

  THE GOOD GUARD

  Kindness often visited me. On this occasion its face was repulsive, full of smallpox scars. Its dark eyes shot terrifying flames, and its voice was thunderous and rough. Deep down, I could not stand this huge, crude, crushingly powerful body.

  We were nailing rails into place and unloading wagons full of ties. We had arrived at our destination after several days of travel. We were surrounded by guards, themselves workers, and all of us were closely supervised by the black uniforms which bore the sign of the death head.

  For several days I had had trouble following the others, and I looked with envy at the feet of those who still had shoes. Mine had been stolen. They had been very valuable to me; their soles were lined with notes I had taken in secret, on scraps of cement sacks I had salvaged. Thefts were frequent. In exchange I had been left with a pair of boots that were too wide and had gaping holes that sucked the cold in. It was life itself that had been snatched from me. I walked but saw nothing, my eyes riveted to the feet dragging in front of me. An aggressive and powerful voice reminded me to speed up.

  I cried from the cold and the tears ran down my face. The pain in my frozen feet was very real to me.

  On the job, I hammered the nails with rage and despair.

  The hideous face with the booming voice had seen everything; without warning he snatched the hammer from my hands and ordered me to follow him. He led me near to a wood fire where no one could see us. With wicked yells belied by a look of kindness, he gesticulated wildly and rubbed my feet with newspapers.

  He took out of his bag a pair of galoshes that he slipped onto my feet.

  With this act of generosity he gave me back my life, and at the same time put his own at risk.

  My good guard became for four months a hidden, caring, and compassionate friend. During these one hundred twenty days, work was less hard and days were less long, because I could see in his eyes my own human face.

  When he left I could cry once more and still hope in the kindness of people.

  AUSCHWITZ CONCERTO

  It was twenty-eight years before I could listen again to Brahms’s Concerto for Violin. Each sound tears through my flesh and drags out from me the image of a scorching, shadeless day in Auschwitz.

  At about two o’clock, thousands of deportees gathered around a rostrum made from planks in the middle of the main road. The lucky ones were in the front rows. Those at the back jostled each other and edged their way toward the front. The only place of shade, under the stage, was completely sealed off by the guards and their dogs. Slowly, in procession, walking somewhat tensely but with dignity, the musicians—first-rate artists from different countries—took their assigned seats. Their heads were shaved, and they were wearing blue and gray striped trousers paired with a formal black jacket over their uniform tops.

  With the crowd pressing all around me, I was carried away as they struck up the first movement. Crouched down and trembling with emotion, I found myself drawn into a fairy-tale world where suffering was clothed in a magical beauty. Through small, gentle waves the music soaked into me like the breath of life.

  The beginning of the second movement was just as pure and rich: it laughed and cried in us.

  Time stood still, but the sun was there, breathing us in.

  I grew ill from the swarming of insects around my head and my ears. To this day, when I think of the third movement I have a paralyzing image of venomous stings. I was in and out of consciousness. Little by little the music became disjointed, ending with the pathetic note of an instrument landing on the rostrum, followed by another, and then another. All I could make out was the strain of a violin through a kind of fog. The sun and its arrows had gotten the better of us. The orchestra became like an ageing fabric, wearing out before our very eyes: holes appeared, and it crumbled into dust.

  Although my senses were dulled, I understood the diabolical game of the SS. The pack of dogs arrived. In less than an hour the great ceremony was over. Those of us who still could got up and made our way like drunkards back to the barracks. The dogs sniffed around the others who, dead or dying, lay on the ground like dead leaves after a gust of wind.

  The sun must have shuddered at this sight. I swore that day that I wanted to stay alive. To tell those who forget to remain vigilant.

  TO LIVE

  How could I forget the great flames of the crematorium which devoured my childhood?

  Despair gave way to emptiness. Inhuman fatigue took possession of me, and almost made me forget everything. A day, a week, a night, an eternity … all became a blur in my mind. I was alone, and I was nothing. Where did my tears come from? Were they still mine? What a strange sensation, to not belong to myself: reality, dream, and despair overlapped. How easy it would have been to give up, to be swept away by the lure of death.

  Everything had been set up to create this life of despair. Fear, uncertainty, and lies were carefully cultivated around us and in us to push us into madness or death. I cannot forget several of my fellow prisoners who would help each other at night to hang themselves in the toilets at the end of the barracks, using scraps of their clothing as a noose. Our entire identity was stripped away from us: mementoes, clothes, even hair or teeth if they were crowned with gold. However, fraternity lived on in the hearts of some of us, and shone forth.

  I can still hear the warm voice of a fellow prisoner, who had been in the camp for five years. She would say to us, “Trust in life. Let us chase away despair. Let us cultivate friendship among us. Let us gather our forces. Let us not lose courage; the weak do not live here. We need to survive. We need witnesses.”

  These words came from an unknown sister. They took root in me and have long since helped me to get through moments of exhaustion.

  If today, though aching all over, I am crossing the bridge of memory, I do so to keep alive the memory of those women and men whose lives were stolen but who, right until the end, wanted to give us the courage to live.

  CHRISTMAS 1944

  I will not forget Christmas 1944. Two days’ break from our work at the time as weavers. The first time in a year of deportations … Two days without working, far from that damned factory, where from morning to night I threaded bobbins!

  I had no gift for that job, and I did nothing to apply myself to it. I did display plenty of false enthusiasm, dazzling with innocence; for once my guards were taken in by it. I did not get hit one time in three months, which was quite a record.

  A great surprise awaited us on the evening of Christmas Day. The factory presented us with a banquet: a little block of margarine, two slices of dried sausage, and, to make our joy complete, two tablespoons of granulated sugar. What a lot of stars in a wooden spoon.

  We savored this feast slowly to make it last longer. It was good. It was a party for our palates, and a warm sense of well-being took hold in us. It took so little to encourage our taste for living, our survival instinct.

  We became poetic and talked about our favorite menus. We recited poems. The momentary sweetness of the present put us back in touch with our past. “Do you remember that friend? That place? The man who sold roasted sunflower seeds at the corner of the road where the school is? That book I loved?” For a few minutes we became human beings again, with a story that went beyond these moments that
we had snatched from both the past and our uncertain future.

  My friend saw me as someone; we had memories in common and thoughts to share. Not everything was dead in us. There was a past, even if rather brief. These were privileged moments, so fragile and so measured. We grabbed them and locked them away in our hearts like an extraordinary gift.

  WAITING

  The wait is so long

  In the depth of winter,

  The sweltering heat of summer

  Full of the unknown, menacing

  For worn-out seconds

  Crushed minutes

  Endless hours

  We await

  Bread

  Gray soup

  Day

  Night

  We wait

  With eyes

  Which defy

  Plead

  Put up

  Die

  We wait in silence

  With hands ready to take in

  To stretch out

  To hold tight

  To give up

  We wait for the end

  Of an exhausting job

  With our legs swollen

  Tense

  Heavy

  Painful

  From forced marches

  From roll calls prolonged for the sake of it

  We wait

  Behind the barbed wire

  With our hearts ready to burst

  Breathless with impatience

  Beaten down with anger and impotence

  With hatred and anxiety

  We wait

  With a glimmer of hope

  THE FINAL MARCHES

  The Allies were advancing.

  Behind us the sound of heavy gunfire was getting closer and closer.

  Where were we going?

  The exodus is long before liberation.