and efficiently. They weeded out people who could no longer stand up and got the stronger men to load the dying into vans. Then they moulded the milling throng into a column, inspired it with the idea of movement and gave this movement direction and purpose.
As they were formed up into ranks of six, the news ran down the column: 'The bath-house! First we're going to the bath-house!'
No merciful God could have thought of anything kinder.
'Very well, Jews, let's be off!' shouted the man in a cape who commanded the unit responsible for unloading the train.
The men and women were picking up their bags; the children were clinging to their mothers' skirts and the lapels of their fathers' jackets. 'The bath-house…! The bath-house…' The words were like a hypnotic charm that filled their consciousness.
There was something attractive about the tall man in the cape. It was as if he were one of them, closer to their unhappy world than to the men in helmets and grey greatcoats. Carefully, entreatingly, an old woman stroked the sleeves of his overalls with the tips of her fingers and asked in Yiddish: 'You're a Jew, aren't you, my child? A Litvak?'
'That's right, mother, that's right.'
Suddenly, in a hoarse, resonant voice, bringing together words used by the two opposing armies, he shouted:
The platform emptied. The men in overalls began sweeping up pieces of rag, scraps of bandages, a broken clog and a child's brick that had been dropped on the ground. They slammed the doors of the wagons. A grinding wave ran down the train as it moved off to the disinfection point.
After they had finished work, the unit returned to the camp through the service gates. The trains from the East were the worst – you got covered in lice and there was a foul stench from the corpses and invalids. No, they weren't like the wagons from Hungary, Holland or Belgium where you sometimes found a bottle of scent, a packet of cocoa or a tin of condensed milk.
45
A great city opened out before the travellers. Its western outskirts were lost in the mist. The dark smoke from the distant factory chimneys blended with the damp to form a low haze over the chequered pattern of the barrack- huts; there was something surprising in the contrast between the mist and the angular geometry of the streets of barracks.
To the north-east there was a dark red glow in the sky; it was as though the damp autumn sky had somehow become red-hot. Sometimes a slow, creeping flame escaped from this damp glow.
The travellers emerged into a spacious square. In the middle of this square were several dozen people on a wooden bandstand like in a public park. They were the members of a band, each of them as different from one another as their instruments. Some of them looked round at the approaching column. Then a grey-haired man in a colourful cloak called out and they reached for their instruments. There was a burst of something like cheeky, timid bird-song and the air – air that had been torn apart by the barbed wire and the howl of sirens, that stank of oily fumes and garbage – was filled with music. It was like a warm summer cloud-burst ignited by the sun, flashing as it crashed down to earth.
People in camps, people in prisons, people who have escaped from prison, people going to their death, know the extraordinary power of music. No one else can experience music in quite the same way.
What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought, but simply the blind, heart-breaking miracle of life itself. A sob passed down the column. Everything seemed transformed, everything had come together; everything scattered and fragmented -home, peace, the journey, the rumble of wheels, thirst, terror, the city rising out of the mist, the wan red dawn – fused together, not into a memory or a picture but into the blind, fierce ache of life itself. Here, in the glow of the gas ovens, people knew that life was more than happiness – it was also grief. And freedom was both painful and difficult; it was life itself.
Music had the power to express the last turmoil of a soul in whose blind depths every experience, every moment of joy and grief, had fused with this misty morning, this glow hanging over their heads. Or perhaps it wasn't like that at all. Perhaps music was just the key to a man's feelings, not what filled him at this terrible moment, but the key that unlocked his innermost core.
In the same way, a child's song can appear to make an old man cry. But it isn't the song itself he cries over; the song is simply a key to something in his soul.
As the column slowly formed into a half-circle round the square, a cream-coloured car drove through the camp gates. An SS officer in spectacles and a fur-collared greatcoat got out and made an impatient gesture; the conductor, who had been watching him, let his hands fall with what seemed like a gesture of despair and the music broke off.
A number of voices shouted 'Halt.' The officer walked down the ranks; sometimes he pointed at people and the guard called them out. He looked them over casually while the guard asked in a quiet voice -so as not to disturb his thoughts: 'Age? Occupation?'
Thirty people altogether were picked out.
Then there was another command:
'Doctors, surgeons!'
No one responded.
'Doctors, surgeons, come forward!'
Again – silence.
The officer walked back to his car. He had lost interest in the thousands of people in the square.
The chosen were formed up into ranks of five and wheeled round towards the banner on the camp gates:
How can one convey the feelings of a man pressing his wife's hand for the last time? How can one describe that last, quick look at a beloved face? Yes, and how can a man live with the merciless memory of how, during the silence of parting, he blinked for a moment to hide the crude joy he felt at having managed to save his life? How can he ever bury the memory of his wife handing him a packet containing her wedding ring, a rusk and some sugar- lumps? How can he continue to exist, seeing the glow in the sky flaring up with renewed strength? Now the hands he had kissed must be burning, now the eyes that had admired him, now the hair whose smell he could recognize in the darkness, now his children, his wife, his mother. How can he ask for a place in the barracks nearer the stove? How can he hold out his bowl for a litre of grey swill? How can he repair the torn sole of his boot? How can he wield a crowbar? How can he drink? How can he breathe? With the screams of his mother and children in his ears?
Those who were to remain alive were taken towards the camp gates. They could hear the other people shouting and they were shouting themselves, tearing at the shirts on their breasts as they walked towards their new life: electric fences, reinforced concrete towers with machine-guns, barrack-huts, pale-faced women and girls looking at them from behind the wire, columns of people marching to work with scraps of red, yellow and blue sewn to their chests.
Once again the orchestra struck up. The people chosen to work entered the town built on the marshes.
Dark water forced its way sullenly and mutely between heavy blocks of stone and slabs of concrete. It was a rusty black and it smelt of decay; it was covered in green chemical foam, filthy shreds of rag, bloodstained clothes discarded by the camp operating-theatres. It disappeared underground, came back to the surface, disappeared once more. Nevertheless, it forced its way through – the waves of the sea and the morning dew were still present, still alive in the dark water of the camp.
Meanwhile, the condemned went to their death.
