Jack awoke one night with pain in his lower abdomen so terrible, he had to bite his tongue not to cry out. He rolled on his back, sweat pouring off him, his insides burning. He had to get to a toilet now.
He made it out the door of the barracks, but then he could move no farther. Diarrhea. In the moonlight, he could see the blood in it.
“Oh no!” he whispered, sobs rising in his throat. “Not this!”
He knew it was dysentery, a disease of the intestinal tract that causes bloody diarrhea. Men in the camp were dying of it. Shaking and unable to stand, he crawled back to his sleeping platform. He was desperately thirsty, his bowels on fire. Would he die?
“I could not get up in the morning,” Jack recalled. “I lay there moaning, feverish and chilled at the same time. The kapo stopped by me. He was tall, with very dark eyes. He was not a bad man. Perhaps he even liked me some, for I had always been pleasant to him, the same as I was to everybody. ‘You must get up,’ he said.
“But I could not stand by myself. He helped me, and, to my amazement, he took me to a sick barracks. I had not known there was such a thing in this camp.”
Inside the barracks were cots. The stench in the room made Jack gag. A prisoner doctor looked at him and confirmed that he had dysentery. There was no medicine. A prisoner assisting the doctor gave Jack a bitter solution of coal ground up with water to drink. “It will help,” he whispered. Jack forced himself to drink it.
All around him, men moaned in agony. In the corner was a pot where they relieved themselves. Jack fell asleep and slept for a long time, then awoke, delirious. Through blurred vision, he saw two prisoners removing the body of the man on his left, who had just died.
He was given more of the coal solution. Whenever a bed emptied because someone died, a new patient quickly took it.
Jack drifted in and out of a stupor, first awake, then asleep. When he was awake, he made himself drink the bitter solution.
On the third day, so many sick prisoners were being brought in that they were lying on the floor. Jack felt a little better, but he was very weak.
Though his vision was still cloudy, he could see the doctor going from cot to cot, giving the sick men shots. As Jack watched, he realized that within minutes of receiving a shot, the man would jerk spasmodically—and then die. The doctor was killing them! Prisoners followed behind the doctor, removing the dead bodies, and another ill man would immediately take the newly vacated cot. Soon the doctor would reach Jack.
He tried to sit up, his head woozy. With great deliberation, he put his feet on the floor and stood up. If he fainted, the doctor, the needle . . . He took a step toward the door, then another step, and sank to his knees, almost falling on a man lying on the floor. He worked his way through the sick men, sometimes crawling on his hands and knees.
By the door, he forced himself to stand again. He took several steps and was outside. His heart raced with fear. He had to get back to his barracks. What if a guard in one of the towers saw him and decided to shoot him? He made his way along the barracks, staying in the shadows. A prisoner on an errand saw him and stopped. All he said was “Which barracks?” as though he knew exactly what was happening. Jack told him the number, and within minutes he was on his sleeping platform. The tall kapo said nothing.
The next morning, prisoner 16013 was at roll call, weak and unsteady, but there. That day and for several thereafter, the kapo got Jack assigned to a coveted indoor job in the camp machine shop so he would not have to march outside or do heavy labor. Soon he had recovered.
Together, he and the kapo had cheated Hitler of one more dead Jew.