UNFREE ASSOCIATIONS

30. Various Encounters

207 30 Various Encounters During my first week in the hospital, a man of about thirty, better dressed than most, entered the hospital and introduced himself in accent-free German. He said, “I am Ernst and I have come to help you get the hospital together.” He explained that he was in charge of supplies and would try to get clothes, medication and food. He brought forth a bitter smile, communicating the limitations of his stock. He wanted a list of the most needed medications and seemed to have some knowledge of medicine. While Sandor was working on our request for supplies, Ernst took me aside and touched my jacket. He said, “I shall bring you a warm coat. We have to stay well for the short time before the end.” I was puzzled about his chummy, fearless attitude on our first encounter. His behavior seemed to me highly unusual for a KAPO and too obvious even if he were an informer. Ernst was a rather mystical figure. The next day he brought me a warm coat, a kind of car coat with a fur collar. I thanked him, touched by his generosity but I knew that I could not walk around a German concentration camp in a furtrimmed coat. I told him this. He looked at me and I grew frightened that I had made an enemy with my straight talk. “You will find a tailor in the hospital who can take the fur off the coat and I’ll take it for myself.” We went into his office next to the storage room and sat on two wooden crates. He started to talk about himself. He was the son of a steelworker, a union organizer, who was taken away when Hitler seized power. When he tried to find his father’s whereabouts by getting in touch with the union, he was arrested. He spent hard times in various prisons and during the last years, like many other German political prisoners, had a variety of functions in the administration of the camps. Nobody even knew anymore why he had been incarcerated 208 Unfree Associations and he assumed that no one cared. Despite the years of heavy work that he had endured, he felt more comfortable in his position as a KAPO in a concentration camp than as a soldier in a lost war. I was surprised at his outspokenness and his convictions about the war coming to an end. He said, “Being a prisoner I don’t need to argue about the obvious signs of military defeat; I don’t believe the fairy tales of new weapons. This is not my war.” When I came back to the hospital with the coat over my arm, a young prisoner, Marek, who was sweeping the floor, turned to me and said something about the fine quality of the car coat. I asked him how he could tell and he said three years earlier when the German army invaded Poland and entered Krakow, he had been a tailor’s apprentice. His family, including his younger siblings, was taken to an isolated spot outside the city and shot. Because he had a deformed foot and limped, he could not keep up with the rest and when he fell, an SS guard shot at him then kicked him into a ditch, where he played dead. He had been in hiding for some time, working under a false name in a textile factory until he was discovered to be a Jew and sent to Auschwitz. At the first selection on arrival, he was able to stand on the toes of his crippled foot, which hurt him but enabled him to walk a few steps without limping. From his description of the examining physician, I guessed that it was Mengele who passed him to the side of the healthy newcomers. He soon learned that he could make himself useful in the camp by altering and repairing the uniforms of important people and was therefore saved from heavy work and long walks. While he was removing the fur collar from my coat, he confessed that he had not yet found a good spot for himself in Ohrdruf; he had swindled his way into the hospital by stepping out of a line while waiting to see a doctor. He scented a chance when he saw an open door. As soon as he stepped out, the line closed smoothly behind him like flowing water and he walked through the...