The Fighter by Jean Jacques Greif

Author:Jean Jacques Greif [Greif, Jean Jacques]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9781619630734
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

We perceive shreds of screams, carried by the wind’s uneven breath

We make up a small kommando, with no kapo to second our SS. He leads us to a camp annex, beyond the gate. Something is fishy. The SS doesn’t shout, doesn’t scold us for walking too slowly, doesn’t call us shitbags. He explains, as if he were talking to friends, that we’ll be able to eat, drink, and even smoke. And that after one week, our situation will improve yet again. We’ll be able to wash and we’ll receive new clothes. Next we expect he’ll offer us women. Fishy and scary.

We reach our new workplace around noon. We discover two large rectangles, some sixty yards long by thirty yards wide, delimited by a furrow in the ground. Three poles with floodlights stand in the center and at the ends of the first rectangle. We’re to dig them up and drive them back into the ground so as to light the other rectangle. One of us, a real electrician, ties special hooks on his hands and feet so he can climb to the top of the poles and remove the wiring.

We notice that the ground seems damp in places. We move toward the poles. Our feet sink into the mud. We wade in a red liquid. Blood!

The SS stays far away from us, more than forty yards. Maybe he doesn’t want to soil his shiny black boots. Or he is scared. Seeing death face-to-face every day has toughened us, but we are scared, too. This is not an ordinary fear, but a kind of deep terror that paralyzes and silences us.

We move the poles and install the floodlights. This is easy work. It is over after two or three hours.

“See that shed?” the SS asks. “That’s where you eat. Then you stay there. You don’t look outside. Do you understand?”

We spend the rest of the day in the shed without doing or saying anything. I just exchange a few whispers with Brod.

“There are bodies.”

“Hundreds. Did you see the size of the rectangles?”

“You could say thousands.”

“The comrades who raised the poles… they’re down there.”

“We’re next. They’ll throw us in.”

On the morning of the second day, we arrive much earlier. We find out that a kommando came during the night and excavated the second rectangle. It now resembles a three-foot-deep swimming pool bordered by mounds of earth. They lock us up in the shed right away, so we can’t see whether there’s anything in the swimming pool.

Yesterday, the SS said we shouldn’t look outside the shed, but he doesn’t say anything today. I guess it doesn’t really matter, since we’re going to die anyway.

All the prisoners know that the Germans murder old people and mothers with their children. We heard about gas as soon as we entered the camp, but we didn’t know how the executioners actually proceeded. So here it is. From our shed window, we watch—as a feeling of dread tears our hearts—the grim spectacle of the Jews’ extermination. We can see several small houses in the distance.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.