The light came on in the dark. “Up!” shouted a harsh voice. “Up! Up!”
Jack was instantly awake. Prisoners were hopping down from the upper bunks, grabbing their cans and hurrying out the door. A fat man wearing the same uniform as the prisoners thundered through the barracks, a truncheon in his hand. He was swinging left and right at the men, screaming at them to hurry up. This was the kapo, the prisoner in charge of the hundred men in this barracks. Jack could not believe his size. All the other men were skin and bones.
As the kapo reached his bunk, Jack just managed to duck a blow coming his way. Grabbing his can, he started for the door, almost tripping in the awkward wooden shoes. He followed the other prisoners to an outside area where he saw men eating. Already his stomach was growling. He had not eaten in over a day. Then the smell struck him—something putrid, something so rotten that you would not even throw it into the pigpens back in his uncle’s village. For a moment, he thought he would throw up. How could food smell so bad?
The line was long and desperate. Jack fought to hold his place as the prisoners behind him pushed and shoved. They were like starving dogs. The kapos walked along, striking out savagely. Jack could see that you treated them with the same deference you gave the guards. Not all of them were fat like his kapo, but most of them seemed mean. They did the work of overseeing the prisoners, while the guards stood at a distance or stayed up in the watchtowers.
Prisoners received their portions of food and immediately wolfed them down. In spite of the threat of a beating, hands reached out to grab for anything and everything. Jack felt a knot in his stomach as he neared the front of the line. What if someone took his food from him?
Ahead of him, prisoners thrust their cans toward the cook, who filled them. When the prisoner in front of Jack held out his can, the cook eyed him and then put some thin soup from the top of the kettle in it.
“Give me more!” the prisoner protested. “This is just water!”
Instead, the cook struck the prisoner’s can with the soup ladle, spilling the watery contents on the muddy ground. With a cry, the prisoner fell to his knees and began to lick up whatever traces of the soup he could find. A kapo was instantly above him, pounding him on the head, shouting at him to get up. Dazed and unable to rise, the man was dragged away by the kapo, who continued to beat him.
Jack’s heart beat hard as he held out his can. The cook filled it. To his surprise, Jack saw a potato floating in the thin soup. He glanced at the cook to thank him, but the cook did not look at Jack. Jack quickly stepped away before a kapo could strike him. In this strange new world, one man got nothing and the next got a precious bit of potato in an otherwise-watery soup. What was the secret of getting the potato?
The soup’s taste was so disgusting that Jack could barely swallow his first sip. It reeked of rotten turnips, and he could see flecks of dirt in it. At home, he would have thrown it away. But not here. He drank it as quickly as he could.
“You get the bread tonight,” a prisoner standing by him said quietly. “Do not try to save it. Someone will steal it.”
Jack recognized the man from the bunk next to his.
“Come quickly now,” the man said. “You have only a few minutes to put your can on your bunk and get to the latrine. Then it is roll call.”
Jack concentrated on not stumbling as they hurried back to the barracks. It was hard to do anything but shuffle in the shoes. He learned the man’s name was Aaron and he was a barber from Kraków. He had sunken cheeks and a large nose. He had been in the camp for two months. He did not know where his wife was, but he presumed she must also be in a camp. Fortunately, he said, they had no children.
As they stood in line at the latrine, Aaron pointed to a tall smokestack on the other side of the camp and told Jack it was the crematorium, where corpses were incinerated, leaving only ashes. “It’s quicker and more sanitary than burial, and many die here,” Aaron said by way of explanation.
Jack shuddered. The Nazis seemed to have figured out everything, including how to eliminate evidence that someone had ever existed.
Finished at the latrine, they hurried toward the open square in the middle of camp and then into a row behind the fat kapo. “Say nothing in line except to call out your number when they count us,” Aaron warned. “Stay at perfect attention and do nothing to make them notice you.”
Prisoners filled the square, thousands of them. The guards in the watchtowers kept their machine guns on them and surveyed them with binoculars. For the next hour, as the sun came up, kapos shouted, “Count off!” at their groups. Jack saw no one younger than he was. He would not be here, either, if it had not been for the letter with the Nazi stamp.
Finally, the fat kapo seemed satisfied with his group and the counting stopped. Still the prisoners stood, the sun beating down on them. Jack needed to go to the latrine. The soup had made him feel sick. He wished he could ask Aaron what they were waiting for, but he knew better than to speak.
From the corner of his eye, he saw a group of SS officers and guards walking to the front. Several of the guards had snarling German shepherd dogs on short leashes. Jack could only imagine what would happen if one of those dogs was set on a prisoner. The kapos reported numbers to the officers. They talked among themselves. Then an officer blew his whistle and, one by one, the columns were marched off to work. Jack felt exhausted—and the day’s work had not yet begun.
The fat kapo ordered Jack into a work detail on the left. Aaron went the other way. Soon Jack and about 150 other prisoners were marching toward the forest outside the camp, SS guards on either side of them, ready to strike a prisoner with a gun butt or beat him over the head for the slightest infraction. Jack struggled with the shoes. Be alert to everything, he told himself. Do not get hit.
When they finally stopped, he thought he would collapse. He knew they had come at least three miles. Between the long march in the impossible shoes and the scant and awful breakfast, how could they now work all day?
But they did—without breaks, and with no water or food. All day long, using only axes and chains, they pulled out tree stumps to make way for a road.
It was backbreaking labor. In the afternoon, it got so hot that Jack wondered if they would all go mad from thirst. Then a prisoner stumbled, causing a tree stump just coming out of the ground to fall back in place, requiring it to be pulled out again. The guards were instantly on the prisoner, beating him until he was unconscious. When the group finally headed back to camp, two prisoners helped the injured man.
“They will shoot him in a day or two,” a prisoner whispered to Jack. “If you cannot work, it is the end of you.”
Jack felt his blood chill. He could already see two differing philosophies among the prisoners. Some tried to work as little as possible so they could conserve their energy. Others tried to work harder so they could avoid beatings. The latter was the better way, Jack decided. He would do here what he had done on the labor details back in the village: He would not complain. He would act respectful. He would be likable, cooperative, and as good a worker as he could be. He would make sure his overseers considered him of value.
Though he knew they would never do so, he wanted them to say, We can count on Jack. Or rather, We can count on prisoner 16013.
When they reached the camp, the men lined up for their ration of bread. Jack’s body was heavy with fatigue. Every muscle ached, and he longed to lie in his bunk, but he was desperate for food. Once again, hunger turned the men into savages. When he was finally given his slice of bread, Jack held it tightly in his hands so no one could grab it from him.
He almost choked on the first bite. He forced himself to eat, wondering what was wrong with the bread. Why was it so gritty? He finished it and hurried to the latrine, holding his nose to avoid the stench.
When he crawled onto his mattress, Aaron was in the bunk next to him. “Where were you today?” Jack asked.
“Except on days when I shave new prisoners, I cut the hair of SS officers and guards and and give them shaves,” he said. “It is not so difficult, but if they do not like what I do, they can kill me. If they like it, they might reward me. And you, Jack, you survived your first day?”
“I have never worked so hard—or eaten so little. The bread . . .”
“Full of sawdust.”
Jack wondered if he had heard correctly.
“They use sawdust as filler. That is why it tastes so terrible.”
“Always?”
Aaron sighed. “The food will not get better. This is all they give you.” He made sure no one was watching, then slipped Jack a thick biscuit. “One of the officers liked his haircut today.”
“I cannot take your food,” Jack replied, though his mouth was already watering.
“He gave me two, and I have eaten one. Take food when you can get it and never question. Many men starve to death here.”
Jack nodded in gratitude.
“Get up early to shower. You must try to stay clean, or you will get sick. Tomorrow, I will wake you, but you will learn to wake early on your own,” Aaron said.
The fat kapo came through the barracks, his truncheon at the ready. “No talking!” he growled. A minute later, when the lone lightbulb went out, Jack ate the biscuit. His body hurt, yet tomorrow he had to do again what he had done today. Could he? He knew he must.
He closed his eyes and fell asleep instantly.