He awoke the next morning covered with lice. Wherever he normally had hair, they were burrowing into his skin and making him itch. He checked his blanket and found it was infested.
He hurried with Aaron to the showers. They stood in a long line. Finally, they reached the dribbles of water from a spigot that passed for a shower. The whole time, they were harassed by kapos to hurry along. Aaron showed Jack how to rinse out his uniform quickly. It felt clammy on his skin and dried stiff. He shuddered, thinking what it would feel like to do this in winter, when it was cold.
But lice carried disease. He had to stay as clean as he could. There was sickness in the camp. Men coughed and had stomach problems. He heard rumors of typhus and dysentery in other camps. Both diseases caused much misery and could be fatal. What if they spread here?
As days became weeks, he grew more sure of the camp routine. Get your share of food, work hard, stay well, stay as clean as possible, avoid beatings. That last one sometimes seemed impossible.
Who could say how or why a prisoner was singled out by the kapos and guards? Blows were random, unexpected, and undeserved: a rubber truncheon across the back, a gun butt to the ribs, a kick in the rear or the stomach. It happened all the time. Maybe you stepped out of line, or maybe the kapo did not like you. They could curse you, take your food from you, or beat you to death. No one stopped them. For every dead prisoner, there were a dozen to take his place.
“You did not expect a guard to do a kindness for you—that almost never happened,” recalled Jack. “The best you could hope for was one who did not beat you or have his dog attack you just for amusement.”
Somehow, Hitler and the Nazi SS who ran the concentration camps had convinced the German guards that Jewish prisoners were subhumans and that all prisoners, Jewish or not, deserved this brutish treatment. Jack knew the guards believed these things, for they said so often enough to the prisoners. There was no arguing with them. You would get your head bashed in for that.
The kapos were another story. All of them were prisoners, some Jewish. Kapos wore special armbands to identify them. The kapos in the different barracks had special privileges and could steal food before it reached the prisoners. The fat kapo did it all the time. Other kapos were in charge of the work details. In all, there was perhaps one kapo for every fifty prisoners. Jack learned that most kapos had been in German prisons before the war for such crimes as murder or theft. When the SS set up its vast system of concentration camps, they moved these criminals into the camps to help control the prisoners.
Some kapos were insane, some were sadistic, and some were not so bad. It would have been easy to despise them, since they had extra food and privileges and had power over the prisoners, but Jack knew their lives were hard, too: They stayed alive only as long as they followed orders.
Jack chose not to hate them or the guards and officers. Hate was destructive and served no good. To hate would consume his strength. Everyone in this camp, he reasoned, had been caught up by events in the war. Everyone had a role to play. To conserve energy, he had to stay as positive as possible—and hate was a negative emotion.
Each non-Jewish prisoner had a colored triangle by his number to denote his “crime.” The fat kapo’s was green, meaning he was a professional criminal. Jack was sure he was a murderer. Another prisoner in his barracks had a red triangle, so he was a political prisoner who had opposed Hitler. Gypsies wore black. Homosexuals wore pink triangles. Purple was for non-Jewish religious prisoners, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, or Protestant or Catholic church leaders who opposed Hitler.
A large majority of the prisoners were Jewish. In some camps, but not all, they wore a yellow triangle. They were at the bottom of the prison hierarchy. By Hitler’s definition, you were Jewish if you had at least one Jewish grandparent. “You were Jewish even if you had converted to Christianity. Even if you had never been in a synagogue in your life. We were a ‘race’ in Hitler’s eyes, and belonging to it was a crime,” Jack said.
One night, a few minutes before lights out, an older prisoner named Moshe, who had been in four different camps in three years, stopped by Jack’s bunk to visit, as he often did. Moshe had sad eyes and a raspy voice. He had been transported to his first camp in a boxcar in which many people had died of suffocation. Jack assumed that Moshe liked to talk to him because he was young, for Moshe had been a schoolteacher and enjoyed teaching. Jack always listened politely to whatever was on Moshe’s mind. That night, it was about how the concentration camps were run.
“You probably think all we do is repair bridges and the like so German soldiers are freed up to fight at the front. But do you know that the camps are also a business?” he asked Jack. “All the able-bodied German men have been drafted into the army, leaving only women to work in the factories. So the SS leases us to them. The SS gets rich and we are worked as slaves. Conditions in those factories are terrible. I know. I have worked in them.
“But not everyone who is Jewish can work,” Moshe continued, “and so what does Hitler do with them?” He lowered his voice. “I hear stories—who knows if they are true—that in some places masses of people are taken straight to killing camps rather than to work camps like this. Here they kill you slowly with backbreaking labor and nothing to eat. But in these special camps, the people are told they are going to take a shower, and many of them are crammed into huge sealed rooms. Then they are gassed to death and their bodies taken to the crematorium.”
Jack did not believe him. “Why would they do that? It makes no sense.”
Moshe shrugged. “We are Jewish. Hitler wants us all dead. I think it is true.”
Later, Jack shared this with Aaron. “I have heard all those rumors, and you should pay them no attention,” he said. “Not even the Nazis are that inhuman. If the Nazis want us all dead, they are already doing that. Did you try to survive in a ghetto? In the ghetto in my town, they starved us. Whole families died. When I shave new prisoners, I see so many who will not last here more than a few weeks. It is not just because they are weak and will not be able to do the work. It is also because, unless they have been in ghettos, they do not know how to live without their freedom.”
“You must feel very sorry for them,” Jack said.
“No.”
“But they are fellow sufferers,” Jack argued. “Surely you feel sympathy for them.”
“Jack,” Aaron said firmly, “this is a place of endless sorrow. Think only of yourself and those closest to you. If you allow yourself to feel emotion, you will die quickly.”
But Jack constantly struggled with his feelings. Most of the men around him were slowly starving to death. They were filthy and sick. Some muttered to themselves. Some cried for their wives and children. They cursed the SS, the Nazis, Hitler, and God.
Yet others, like Aaron, stayed strong and helped others whenever they could. Sometimes, Aaron could get extra food, and he did not have to do heavy outside labor, but his survival depended on something more than that. What was the secret of staying strong?
One day as Aaron cut Jack’s hair, he told him. “Think of this as a game, Jack. Above all else, do not take personally what is happening to you. Play the game right and you might outlast the Nazis.”
Play the game, thought Jack. He had done that very thing back in his uncle’s village. Find extra food so you do not starve to death. When you walk across a field, keep your eyes open for a potato, a carrot, for anything edible.
Jack had learned other rules as well. Do what you are told. Never call attention to yourself. Help your friends, because you cannot survive without them. Stay healthy. Each morning after drinking the thin soup, do what you can to clean up, though you have only a trickle of water, no soap, no towel, no scissors, no toothbrush. If you have a toothache, either learn to tolerate the pain or pull the tooth. See the barbers for monthly haircuts and endure the torture of periodic disinfecting to kill lice, even though you will soon have them again.
It is a game. Think of it that way.
But the consequence for a false move is death.
If you showed up for roll call with so much as a bandage on, you could be ordered aside and later killed. If you were beaten for any reason and could not work, then you would be killed. But do not take it personally.
After six months in the Blechhammer concentration camp, Jack was thin but still healthy. He had learned to tolerate lice. No matter how cold and unpleasant it might be, he rinsed his uniform whenever he could. With Aaron’s help, he was not starving. At times he was so hungry he ate bark from trees and mushrooms from the forest, though he knew they could be poisonous.
Then one cold winter morning after roll call, Jack and several hundred other prisoners were held back while the others were marched off to work. Without explanation, they were loaded on trucks and driven away from the camp. Jack thought he would freeze as the wind whipped around him. It was a snowy day—February, someone said; the year 1943, someone else said. Word went around that they were being to a different camp.
It was true. Hours later, they were processed into the new camp. Jack was filled with anxiety. “As awful as Blechhammer had been, I knew what to expect. Now I had to start over in a new place, and Aaron was not there to help me.”
Most of the prisoners in this camp, like the last one, were Polish, German, or Russian. The SS guards, as always, were German. Jewish prisoners who spoke Yiddish could understand enough German because of similarities in the languages. Most Poles already knew German; the Russians quickly learned what they needed to know.
In this camp, instead of having individual bunks in the endless rows of numbered barracks, eight prisoners had to crowd together at night on each of the eight-foot-wide three-tiered wooden platforms that lined the walls. There were no mattresses.
“At least all those bodies provided a little body heat, because the nights could get very cold and our wooden barracks were unheated,” Jack said. “If you had to go to the bathroom in the night, you used your food can. The toilets were outside in the open, in the freezing cold. If you were caught in the beam of the searchlight on the guard tower, a guard would try to shoot you. So you used your can, and in the morning you dumped the can, then used it for your soup. You had no choice.”
The food was as bad as in the last camp. But here there were no showers, no way to stay clean or to rinse out uniforms. When typhus broke out in the camp, it quickly spread. Jack caught it and had fever, chills, and a terrible cough. He dragged himself to roll call and, using all his strength and determination, continued to work. Many prisoners, including some in his barracks, became delirious and died. Each morning, the dead were carried out, and by night new prisoners were in their places on the platforms. Black smoke belched from the camp crematorium for hours every day.
It took Jack a long time to feel he was over the illness. Other prisoners said he was lucky and would never get it again—that a mild case was like an inoculation.
He was still in the game. He wished he could tell Aaron.