Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel

Author:Olga Lengyel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 1995-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

At Camp D, which was a men’s enclosure, a barrack was reserved for male children. One afternoon the S.S. assembled all the youngsters, called the roll, and proceeded to make a selection. How they had survived the initial selection upon arrival I do not know, unless for some reason none had been made at that time. The procedure they used was weird. A cord was stretched to a certain height. All who passed under this mark were automatically set aside for the gas chambers. Of one hundred children, only five or six survived.

By the end of the afternoon the adult internees looked on, numbly, while twenty trucks laden with these naked children, shivering from the cold, pulled away toward Birkenau. As the trucks passed, the children cried out their names so that their parents might be notified.

Most of the little condemned boys knew what their fate would be. So it was amazing that they bore up at all. Apparently, the camp had matured them, for they accepted the news with more sangfroid than the strongest adults ever did.

One internee told me that he had been in their barrack while they waited for the trucks. The children were sitting on the floor, wide-eyed and silent. He asked one lad, “Well, how are you, Janeck?”

With a thoughtful expression on his face, the child answered, “Everything is so bad here that it can only be better ‘over there.’ I am not afraid.”

I spoke to a twelve-year-old boy from the Czech camp who was wandering along the barbed wire, looking for something to eat. After speaking to him for a few minutes, I said, “Karli, do you know that you are too clever?”

“Yes,” was the reply, “I know that I am very clever. But I know, too, that I shall never have a chance to be more clever. That is what is tragic.”

The story circulated throughout the camp about how bravely one little boy behaved before he climbed into the truck which was to take him to the gas chamber.

“Don’t cry, Pista,” he begged another Hungarian youngster. “Haven’t you seen that our grandparents, our fathers, our mothers, and our sisters were killed? It is our turn now.”

Before he entered the truck, he turned to the S.S. with a grim expression. He said to the German, “But one thing gives me pleasure. Very soon you will croak, too.”

That evening as I was cleaning the latrine pit of the hospitals, I found myself aided by a group of fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boys from Camp D. These were the sole survivors of the mass liquidation. They confided that members of the Sonderkommando, though calloused by the murders they were compelled to perform, had been so indignant that, at the risk of their own lives, they had let a few victims slip through. These children had rejoined their comrades. How long they would be free before the Germans noticed it, no one could say.

Once more the mothers in our camp spent a sleepless night. How could they sleep? For they were eternally haunted by the fear that their children had been liquidated at Camp D.

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