missed my own
birthday. I was fifteen now, maybe even sixteen. It was
winter, but I had no idea what month it was, let alone
what day. I had been in concentration camps more
than two years. I looked at the boy and remembered
my own hasty bar mitzvah in Kraków. I had been so
young then, a lifetime ago.
The ceremony was fast so we wouldn’t be caught.
When it was over, the men all whispered “Mazel tov”
and climbed back onto their shelves. I went up to the
boy and pressed the wooden horse into his hands,
the only present I could give him. The boy looked at
me with big, round eyes. Had I ever been so young?
“We are alive,” I told him. “We are alive, and that is
all that matters. We cannot let them tear us from the
pages of the world.”
I said it as much for me as for him. I said it in memory
of Uncle Moshe, and my mother and father, and my
aunts and other uncles and cousins. The Nazis had put
me in a gas chamber. I had thought I was dead, but I was
alive. I was a new man that day, just like the bar mitzvah
boy. I was a new man, and I was going to survive .
Chapter Eighteen
I stood at the water pump, scrubbInG my body. It was bitterly cold out, but I didn’t care. I would
scrub my body, I decided, each and every morning, no
matter how cold it was, no matter how tired I was. I
was alive, and I meant to stay that way.
We had no soap, but at least I was able to wash away
the caking dirt of Birkenau. I paid careful attention to
where I had been tattooed. Too many others had let
their tattoos get infected, and that had taken them to
the camp surgeon. You didn’t want to go to the camp
surgeon. Ever. I even rubbed my teeth with my wet
fingers— we had no toothbrushes or toothpaste, of
course, but it felt important to remember what it was
like to be human.
As I scrubbed the taint of Birkenau from my body,
I read the signs the Nazis had posted above the water
pump: “The block is your home: Maintain cleanliness!” and “One louse — your death!” Big jokers, the
Nazis. You could play by the rules, keep yourself
clean, do everything right, and still the Nazis would
kill you for looking at them wrong. But I played
the game.
Work at Birkenau was as bad as everywhere else.
Here, as in Plaszów, we were to build new barracks.
The ground for the new section was so big it would
double the size of the camp when it was finished. The
Nazis called the new camp B III, but we prisoners
called it Mexico. I don’t know where the name started,
but Mexico always sounded exotic to me. Warm and
sunny, with beaches and laughing faces. Maybe that’s
why the prisoners nicknamed it Mexico. To make
them think of something very different from what B
III really was. The camp storehouse, where the Nazis
kept all the valuables the Jews from towns and villages brought with them when they first arrived, we
called Canada. Food was weak coffee substitute in the
morning, watery soup at lunch, and bread at night.
The bread was hard and tasteless and had to serve as
breakfast as well. The soup was tepid, and you were
lucky if there was a limp potato floating in it. I learned
a trick with the soup, which was to wait awhile before
lining up for it. The heavier parts of the soup sank to
the bottom. If you were among the last in line, your
soup was thicker. I almost always got some chunk in
my soup by holding back until the end. Just that little
bit of extra food might keep me from becoming a
Muselmann.
We were forbidden to go out at night, so instead of
the camp latrines we had to use a barrel in the barrack
if we had to go to the bathroom. There were two barrels for five hundred people, so we learned to go to the
latrines during the day as much as we could. There
was one latrine per prison block — really just a row of
holes cut in boards that sat over the cesspit. Prisoners
stood guard at the door with clocks. Their job was to
make sure no prisoner spent more than two minutes
in the
birthday. I was fifteen now, maybe even sixteen. It was
winter, but I had no idea what month it was, let alone
what day. I had been in concentration camps more
than two years. I looked at the boy and remembered
my own hasty bar mitzvah in Kraków. I had been so
young then, a lifetime ago.
The ceremony was fast so we wouldn’t be caught.
When it was over, the men all whispered “Mazel tov”
and climbed back onto their shelves. I went up to the
boy and pressed the wooden horse into his hands,
the only present I could give him. The boy looked at
me with big, round eyes. Had I ever been so young?
“We are alive,” I told him. “We are alive, and that is
all that matters. We cannot let them tear us from the
pages of the world.”
I said it as much for me as for him. I said it in memory
of Uncle Moshe, and my mother and father, and my
aunts and other uncles and cousins. The Nazis had put
me in a gas chamber. I had thought I was dead, but I was
alive. I was a new man that day, just like the bar mitzvah
boy. I was a new man, and I was going to survive .
Chapter Eighteen
I stood at the water pump, scrubbInG my body. It was bitterly cold out, but I didn’t care. I would
scrub my body, I decided, each and every morning, no
matter how cold it was, no matter how tired I was. I
was alive, and I meant to stay that way.
We had no soap, but at least I was able to wash away
the caking dirt of Birkenau. I paid careful attention to
where I had been tattooed. Too many others had let
their tattoos get infected, and that had taken them to
the camp surgeon. You didn’t want to go to the camp
surgeon. Ever. I even rubbed my teeth with my wet
fingers— we had no toothbrushes or toothpaste, of
course, but it felt important to remember what it was
like to be human.
As I scrubbed the taint of Birkenau from my body,
I read the signs the Nazis had posted above the water
pump: “The block is your home: Maintain cleanliness!” and “One louse — your death!” Big jokers, the
Nazis. You could play by the rules, keep yourself
clean, do everything right, and still the Nazis would
kill you for looking at them wrong. But I played
the game.
Work at Birkenau was as bad as everywhere else.
Here, as in Plaszów, we were to build new barracks.
The ground for the new section was so big it would
double the size of the camp when it was finished. The
Nazis called the new camp B III, but we prisoners
called it Mexico. I don’t know where the name started,
but Mexico always sounded exotic to me. Warm and
sunny, with beaches and laughing faces. Maybe that’s
why the prisoners nicknamed it Mexico. To make
them think of something very different from what B
III really was. The camp storehouse, where the Nazis
kept all the valuables the Jews from towns and villages brought with them when they first arrived, we
called Canada. Food was weak coffee substitute in the
morning, watery soup at lunch, and bread at night.
The bread was hard and tasteless and had to serve as
breakfast as well. The soup was tepid, and you were
lucky if there was a limp potato floating in it. I learned
a trick with the soup, which was to wait awhile before
lining up for it. The heavier parts of the soup sank to
the bottom. If you were among the last in line, your
soup was thicker. I almost always got some chunk in
my soup by holding back until the end. Just that little
bit of extra food might keep me from becoming a
Muselmann.
We were forbidden to go out at night, so instead of
the camp latrines we had to use a barrel in the barrack
if we had to go to the bathroom. There were two barrels for five hundred people, so we learned to go to the
latrines during the day as much as we could. There
was one latrine per prison block — really just a row of
holes cut in boards that sat over the cesspit. Prisoners
stood guard at the door with clocks. Their job was to
make sure no prisoner spent more than two minutes
in the
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