Sunrise West Read Free

lay on the cold cement floor in a pool of water, as we’d been ordered to do. At the ominous sound of the 4.30 gong we got up and rushed out to be counted, before being forced to endure a half-hour of rapid squatting and standing.
    A crispy calcium air hovered about the camp on that Yom Kippur morning. After a night of lying in freezing water, two men seeking a shred of warmth found each other’s back. Soon others did likewise, and before long a broad cluster of stalks — a strange human sheaf — stood in the space between barrack and barrack, and a little apart from the rest of us. As the warmth seeped through these prisoners’ bones, the sheaf began to murmur a Yiddish tune, its words penned by the poet Avraham Reisen:

    Dance, rejoice, crazy winds,
    This is your golden time;
    Long will this cruel winter last,
    And your heinous crime.

    Rend the shutters from the windows,
    Smash the windowpanes;
    Somewhere a candle flickers dimly,
    Snuff it without shame.

    Drive the birds from the forests,
    Scatter them with wrath;
    Those who cannot fly the distance
    Murder on the spot.

    The camp authorities quickly got wind of this dangerous rebellion and within no time the whole assembly was surrounded by a ring of bludgeon-wielding kapos . The offending group, the human sheaf, was marched off, never to be seen again.
    An eerie silence enfolded the barrack as our Blockführer , who before turning criminal had allegedly studied Roman history, stomped in. He was drunk.
    â€˜I must know the meaning of that song,’ he announced. ‘The one sung yesterday by those Jews who are now facing their Maker... Hey you!’ he shrilled at a man who stood out a little from the crowd, ‘tell us what message your song carried.’
    â€˜Sadness, Herr Blockführer , only sadness.’
    A deft punch from Rysiek felled the man. The historian stood with one foot on his body, like a victor of old. ‘ Sau Juden ! Not the Visigoths, not the Vandals,’ he fumed, ‘butyour contagious sadness — your Jüdischer Demut — was what destroyed the Roman Empire. Well, that will not work with us, it will not work with us!’ And he stood back, as if to deliver a soliloquy.
    â€˜Your God promised to make your offspring as numerous as the dust of the earth,’ he declared, now citing Genesis, ‘so that if one could count the dust of the earth, thus would your offspring too be counted. But we have proved that your God was only partly correct. You are dust, yes, but remember — we will count you and count you, until there is nothing left of you to be counted!’

    Â 
    Â  Rudolf’s Silver Spoon  
    O simple spoon, your greatness can be valued only by a man who has been forced to sup like a dog from one plate with four other starved men.
    A few weeks before the Jews from the city of the waterless river were brought to Birkenau, the Germans, to the lively strains of the camp orchestra, exterminated thousands of gypsies in a single night. A youngster from Frankfurt am Main, a denizen of the Lager since its inception and known as Rudolf the Mad, dubbed the event ‘Johann Strauss’s Waltz of Death’:

    â€˜ Ein Zwei Drei, Ein Zwei Drei,
    Dear Lady Death, come another day.
    There is no escape from your eager hand,
    For this is Germany’s nightmare land.’

    Rudolf, who on account of his beautiful Aryan mother had reputedly (as the bitter jokesters had it) been driven to camp in a Mercedes limousine, could not push that killing spree from his mind. ‘Not only can I still smell the gypsies’ sweat from the crematorium chimney,’ he would tell us, ‘but I can hear their sad melodies in the buzz of the electric fence.’
    One day he said to me, ‘You know, the authorities wanted to certify me, but my uncle Kurt, who was high up in the SS, argued that I was too crazy to be locked up!’
    Encouraged by my chuckle, he continued in a more serious