Spark of Life Read Free Page B

shrink. One gaineda little more space by lying sideways, packed like sardines, but even so one heard often enough at night the hollow thud of someone falling down in his sleep. Many slept crouching and the lucky one was he whose bedfellows died in the evening. They were then carried away, and for one night he could stretch out until new arrivals came.
    The Veterans had secured for themselves the corner to the left of the door. They were still twelve men. Two months ago they had been forty-four. The winter had finished them off. They all knew they were in the last stages; the rations grew steadily smaller and sometimes there was nothing whatever to eat for one or two days; then the dead lay outside in heaps.
    Of the twelve one was mad and believed he was a German sheep dog. He no longer had any ears; they had been torn off when SS dogs had been trained on him. The youngest Veteran was called Karel and was a boy from Czechoslovakia. His parents were dead; they manured a pious peasant’s potato field in the village of Westlage; for the ashes of the cremated were poured into sacks in the crematorium and sold as artificial manure. They were rich in phosphorous and calcium. Karel wore the red badge of the political prisoner. He was eleven years old.
    The oldest Veteran was seventy-two. He was a Jew who fought for his beard. The beard belonged to his religion. The SS had forbidden it, but the man had kept on trying to let it grow. Each time in the labor camp he had been laid on the whipping block for it and given a hiding. In the Small camp he was luckier. Here the SS paid less attention to the rules and also checked up less frequently; they had too great a fear of lice, dysentery, typhoid and tuberculosis. The Pole, Julius Silber, had called the old man Ahasver because he had survived almost a dozen Dutch, Polish, Austrian and German concentration camps. Meanwhile Silber had died of typhoid and bloomed as a primrose plant in the garden of CommandantNeubauer, who received the ashes of the dead free of charge; but the name Ahasver had remained. The old man’s face had shrunk in the Small camp, but the beard had grown and become the home and forest for generations of sturdy lice.
    The room senior of the section was the former physician Dr. Ephraim Berger. He was important in the fight against death which closely surrounded the barrack. In winter when the skeletons had fallen on the slippery ice and broken their bones, he had been able to put on splints and save some of them. The hospital received no one from the Small camp; it existed only for those able to work and for prominent people. In the Big camp the ice in winter had also been less dangerous; during the worst days the road had been strewn with ashes from the crematorium, not out of consideration for the prisoners but to preserve the useful manpower. Since the incorporation of concentration camps into the general pooling of labor more importance had been attached to it. As compensation the prisoners of course had been worked to death faster. The losses didn’t matter; every day enough new men were arrested.
    Berger was one of the few prisoners who had permission to leave the Small camp. For several weeks he had been occupied in the crematorium’s mortuary. In general, room seniors did not have to work, but there was a shortage of physicians; this was why he had been commandeered. It was to the advantage of the barrack; via the lazaret kapo, who had known Berger from earlier days, he could sometimes get some lysol, cotton wool, aspirin and similar things for the skeletons. He also possessed a bottle of iodine which he kept hidden under his straw.
    The most important Veteran of all, though, was Leo Lebenthal. He had secret connections with the black market of the labor camp, and, so rumor had it, also with the outside. How he managed this no one exactly knew. It was known only that two whores from the establishment The Bat, which lay outside the town, belonged to it.Even an