The overwhelming majority of the women, the children, and the elderly we process with gas and fire. The men, of course, as is right, walk a different path to recovery. Arbeit Macht Frei says the sign on the gate, with typically gruff and unde-signing eloquence. The men work for their freedom. There they go now, in the autumn dusk, the male patients in their light pajamas, while the band plays. They march in ranks of five, in their wooden clogs. Look. There’s a thing they do, with their heads. They bend their heads right back until their faces are entirely open to the sky. I’ve tried it. I try to do it, and I can’t. There’s this fist of flesh at the base of my neck, which the men don’t yet have. The men come here awful thin. You can’t get a stethoscope to them. The bell bridges on their ribs. Their hearts sound far away.
There they go, to the day’s work, with their heads bent back. I was puzzled at first but now I know why they do it, why they stretch their throats like that. They are looking for the souls of their mothers and their fathers, their women and their children, gathering in the heavens—awaiting human form, and union. . . . The sky above the Vistula is full of stars. I can see them now. They no longer hurt my eyes.
These familial unions and arranged marriages, known as selections on the ramp, were the regular high points of the KZ routine. It is a commonplace to say that the triumph of Auschwitz was essentially organizational: we found the sacred fire that hides in the human heart—and built an autobahn that went there. But how to explain the divine synchronies of the ramp? At the very moment that the weak and young and old were brought from the Sprinkleroom to the railway station, as good as new, so their menfolk completed the appointed term of labor service and ventured forth to claim them, on the ramp, a trifle disheveled to be sure, but strong and sleek from their regime of hard work and strict diet. As matchmakers, we didn’t know the meaning of the word failure; on the ramp, stunning successes were as cheap as spit. When the families coalesced, how their hands and eyes would plead for one another, under our indulgent gaze. We toasted them far into the night. One guard, his knees bent and swaying, played an accordion. Actually we all drank like fiends. The stag party on the ramp, and the Kapos, like the groom’s best friends, shoving the man into the waiting cart—freshly sprayed with trash and shit—for the journey home.
The Auschwitz universe, it has to be allowed, was fiercely coprocentric. It was made of shit. In the early months I still had my natural aversion to overcome, before I understood the fundamental strangeness of the process of fruition.
Enlightenment was urged on me the day I saw the old Jew float to the surface of the deep latrine, how he splashed and struggled into life, and was hoisted out by the jubilant guards, his clothes cleansed by the mire. Then they put his beard back on. I also found it salutary to watch the Scheissekommando about its work. This team had the job of replenishing the ditches from the soil wagon, not with buckets or anything like that but with flat wooden spades. In fact a great many of the camp’s labor programs were quite clearly unproductive. They weren’t destructive either. Fill that hole. Dig it up again. Shift that. Then shift it back. Therapy was the order of the day. . . . The Scheissekommando was made up of our most cultured patients: academics, rabbis, writers, philosophers. As they worked, they sang arias, and whistled scraps of symphonies, and recited poetry, and talked of Heine, and Schiller, and Goethe … In the officers’ club, when we are drinking (which we nearly always are), and where shit is constantly mentioned and invoked, we sometimes refer to Auschwitz as Anus Mundi. And I can think of no finer tribute than that.
There are other revealing examples of camp argot. The main Ovenroom is called Heavenblock, its main approach road Heavenstreet. Chamber and Sprinkleroom are known, most mordantly, as the central hospital. Sommerfrische is our name for a tour of duty here, in any season: “summer air,” suggesting a perennial vacation from an inadequate reality. When we mean never we say tomorrow morning—it’s like the Spanish saying mañana. The slenderest patients, those whose faces are nothing more than a triangle of bone around the eyes, they’re Muselmänner: not, as I first thought, as an ironical glance at musclemen. No. The angularity of hip and shoulder suggests Muslims—Muslims at prayer. Of course, they’re not Muslims. They’re Jews. Well, we converted them! Wh n