“You reap what you sow, you Nazi stinkers!”
“You want food? So did we, in the camps to which you put us!”
“Trot along, Hitlerite swine!”
“You deserve to starve to death, you fascist bastards!”
Pale-faced and trembling from some strange emotion, Tadek stared after the Germans and only whispered something unintelligible, “really shouldn’t… they have children with them…”
No one heard him in the general commotion. Suddenly, he felt even more alone and abandoned than ever. The Soviets were not his people, but these gloating strangers, it had occurred to him just now, weren’t either. So desperately he wished to believe that with the end of the war, all the hatred, all the vileness would somehow miraculously disappear from people’s hearts but it was still here, on full display and coming from his own comrades at that. Soiled, all of them soiled and marked with it and there was no salvation from it any longer. Everything seemed lost. Lost and without hope, all around him.
With the heat outside, the air inside the temporary quarters that housed the liberated men soon grew thick with breath and stale sweat. Much too like the undressing rooms in the crematorium, in which he had spent his days – and nights, when some special Aktion was announced and the new, night shift was added to the day one so that the SS would fill their killing quota. After all, there must have been some killing quota given by someone from Berlin and Herr Kommandant was much too efficient of a servant to his beloved Führer. He couldn’t quite have failed him, could he now? Of course not. The infamous German Ordnung and all that rot.
Suddenly, annoyed and restless, Tadek jumped to his feet and rushed out of the room, just so as not to see these faces around him anymore – sunken eyes, toothless mouths, bony skulls with leathery, scaly skin covering them. As if the dead had come alive and come to get him at last. For the last few meters along the former school’s corridor, Tadek broke into a run and nearly took one of the Americans off his feet at the door.
“Whoa, where’s the fire, kid?” The American’s teeth gleamed white in the blinding afternoon but the amused smile quickly dropped. “What’s the matter? You all right?”
In Tadek’s throat, the simple words can’t breathe suddenly stuck. He barely managed to tear into the collar of his shirt in a fruitless effort to loosen it. Wide-eyed and panicking, he clawed at his own chest, his neck, the American’s sleeve and felt himself falling, as black spots began swimming in front of his eyes. The chilling, animalistic dread had crept upon him and caught him unawares. Everything that had been bottled up for so long had exploded and threatened to drown him in its invisible well, in which the water was poisoned, in which the SS gloved hand was dropping little Jewish infants… Against his will, his mind conjured up the past that threatened to obliterate him now. Distorted images swam before his eyes. Cold sweat was pouring down his back in streams.
“Come here.”
Even the American’s words sounded as if they were coming from underwater. A pair of strong hands were pulling Tadek aside and making him squat by the wall.
“Put your head between your knees. It’s the nerves. You ought to calm down.”
With the reassuring weight of the American’s hand on his back, Tadek managed to do the little that was asked from him. One breath in. One breath out. One in. One out. He sucked the air greedily out of the atmosphere, forcing his non-cooperating lungs under control. One in. One out. His heart was beating so wildly in his chest, he feared it would give in any moment now. Was it possible to die of a heart attack at twenty-years-old? One in. After Auschwitz, he thought anything was possible. One out.
“That’s it. Slow them down.”
The American was rubbing his back slightly – such a positively human gesture that suddenly choked Tadek with a spasm of tears. But just like the air, the tears also wouldn’t come. They were stuck somewhere behind his black eyes, just as black and full of poison.
“Auschwitz?” the American inquired, with quiet sympathy in his voice.
Instinctively, Tadek pulled the rolled sleeve of his shirt down, covering the hateful tattoo. Straight-backed and rigid at once, he tried to move away from the American’s palm but it was too late. He could keep his secret from the clipboard fellow but this one had already discovered it; felt the muscle and not bone under the shirt that concealed it so conveniently from the curious eyes.
“Were you in that special…” The American seemingly searched for the right word. “In that crematorium gang?”
Tadek nodded stiffly.
“Camp elite, from what I heard.” The American encouraged him with a well-meaning smile. It appeared, he wished to make it clear that he didn’t blame Tadek one bit for faring better than the rest of the inmates. “They weren’t as hard on you as on the outside gangs, were they?”
“No. They hardly ever beat us. We were allowed to keep books and have unlimited access to alcohol. Behind the crematorium, there was a football field. Every Sunday, we had matches – SS vs SK. They also fed us well, our supervisors. They needed us to be strong to hurl all of those…” He swallowed hard and straightened himself, sensing the same apologetic notes in his voice that always found their way in, despite all rational thinking. It wasn’t his fault that he was singled out during the very first selection, for his powerful build; not his fault either that he was made into a Nazi slave doing the worst possible job for them. It mattered not. The guilt was still there. He survived, while the others didn’t. He played ball with the SS, while the others died in their hundreds,
