The two Resistance leaders listen silently. It’s hard for them to comprehend why a death factory like Auschwitz, where inmates are valuable only for their labor, would convert one of its camps into something as unprofitable as a family compound.
“I still don’t get it,” mutters Schmulewski. “The Nazis are psychopaths and criminals, but they’re not stupid. Why would they want young children in a forced labor camp when they consume food, occupy space, and don’t produce anything useful?”
“Could it be some experiment on a grand scale by that lunatic Dr. Mengele?”
No one knows. Rosenberg turns to another mystery. The documentation that arrived with the September shipment of inmates came with a special annotation: “Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) after six months.” And SB6 was added to the number tattooed on each prisoner’s arm.
“Does anyone know anything more about that ‘special treatment’?”
The question hangs in the air, unanswered. The Polish cook continues to scratch away at a bit of dried food stuck to his apron, which hasn’t been clean in a long while. Schmulewski whispers what they’re all thinking: “In here, treatments are so special that they kill.”
“But what’s the point?” asks Rudi Rosenberg. “If they plan to get rid of them, why spend money feeding them for six months? It’s not logical.”
“It has to be. If you learn anything when you’re working near the Germans, it’s that everything has its rationale, whatever it might be. It might be terrible or cruel … but there’s always a reason.”
“And even if the special treatment consisted in taking them off to the gas chambers, what could we do?”
“Not a lot right now. We’re not even sure that’s what it is.”
Just then, another man arrives. He’s young, tall and strong, and he’s nervous. He’s not wearing the prisoner’s uniform, either; instead, he has a turtleneck sweater—a rare privilege for an inmate. Rudi makes as if to leave so they won’t think he’s meddling, but the Pole gestures for him to stay.
“Thanks for coming, Shlomo. We get very little information about the special operations unit.”
“I won’t be able to stay long, Schmulewski.”
The young man waves his hands around a lot. Rudi deduces from this that he must be a Latin, and he’s not wrong. Shlomo comes from a Jewish-Italian community in Thessaloníki.
“We don’t know a great deal about what happens in the gas chambers.”
“Three hundred more this morning, just in the second crematorium. Most of them were women and children.” Shlomo pauses and looks at them. He wonders if you really can explain the inexplicable. He waves his hands in the air and looks up at the sky, but it’s overcast. “I had to help a little girl take off her shoes because her mother was holding a baby, and they have to go into the chamber naked. She kept poking her tongue out at me playfully as I was taking off her sandals. She would have been less than four.”
“And they don’t suspect anything?”
“May God forgive me.… They’ve just arrived after spending three days traveling in a freight car. They’re stunned, frightened. An SS guard with a machine gun tells them they’re going to have a shower, and they believe him. What else would they think? The guards get them to hang their clothes on hooks and even tell them to take note of the number of the hook so they can retrieve their clothes afterward. That’s how they make them believe they’ll be coming back. The guards even insist they tie their shoelaces together so they won’t lose their shoes. That way, it’s easier to gather up all the shoes later on and take them to the hut we call Canada, where they pick out the best articles of clothing to send to Germany. The Germans make use of everything.”
“And you can’t warn them?” Rudi jumps in.
He immediately feels Schmulewski’s hard stare drilling into him. Rudi has no right to a vote or an opinion here. But the Jewish-Italian answers him in that distressed way he has of speaking, as if he were asking for forgiveness with every word that comes out of his mouth.
“May God forgive me. No, I don’t warn them. What would a mother with two children do? Turn on the armed guards? They’d hit her in front of her children; they’d kick her when she fell down. They do that already, in fact. If anyone asks a question, they break his teeth with their rifle butts so he won’t talk anymore, and after that no one says another word; everyone looks elsewhere. The SS won’t allow anyone to interfere with the process. Once, a well-dressed, erect old woman arrived, holding the hand of her six-or seven-year-old grandson. That woman knew. I don’t know how she knew, but she knew they were going to kill them. She threw herself at the feet of an SS guard, she knelt in front of him and begged him to kill her but to let her grandson live. Do you know what that guard did? He dropped his trousers, took out his penis, and started to urinate over her, just like that. The woman, totally humiliated, went back to her place. Today, there was a very elegant woman. I’m sure she came from a good family. She was embarrassed about having to undress. I stood in front of her, with my back to her, to screen her. Then she was so ashamed of being naked in front of us that she put her daughter in front of her to cover herself. But she thanked me with such a sweet smile.…”
He stops for a moment, and the others respect his silence. They even look down as if to prevent themselves from looking immodestly at the naked mother hugging her daughter.
“They went into the chamber with the rest of them, may God forgive me. The guards squash them in, you know? They put in more than can really fit. If there are any healthy men in the group, they leave them till last and then they drive them in with blows so that they’ll force their way inside and make room for themselves by pushing against those already in there. Then they seal the chamber, which has showerheads so the prisoners won’t be suspicious and will keep on thinking they’re going to have a shower.”
“And then?” asks Schmulewski.
“We remove the lid of the tank and one of the SS guards throws in a canister of Zyklon gas. Then we wait fifteen minutes, maybe a bit less.… And then, silence.”
“Do they suffer?”
A sigh, followed by another glance heavenward.
“May God forgive me, you have no idea what it’s like. When you enter the chamber, you find a mountain of intertwined corpses. I’m sure many of them die of asphyxiation from being crushed. When the poison hits, the body must react horribly: suffocation, convulsions. The corpses are covered in excrement. Their eyes are bulging and their bodies bleeding, as if everything inside had exploded. Their hands are contorted into claws and twisted around other bodies in an act of desperation, and their necks are stretched upward so tautly in the hunt for air that they look as if they’re going to snap.”