Free Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz Page A

mine.
    “What’s this? How did this happen? Who’s
done this?”
It was the voice of one of the kapo s. It wasn’t said in
the tone the kapo s used to taunt us or goad us into
working harder. This was something different.
Something confused. Something scared. The other kapo s heard it in his voice right away and ran around
the corner to help. Without guards, we put down our
picks and our shovels and hurried to peek around the
corner behind them.
It was the Judenrat policeman. Holtzman or
Finkelstein or whatever his name was. His head had
been smashed in with a shovel, and the rest of his body
was gashed and torn and bleeding. In the carbide light
from a dozen watching headlamps, something glittered and shone in his cuts.
Salt . Someone had rubbed salt in all his wounds.
Like Abimelech, in the book of Judges, who sowed the
fields of his own people with salt after he put down
their rebellion. I remembered reading about him
while studying the Torah with my father, long before
the war.
This was punishment and purification, all in one.
“I said I want to know who did this!” the kapo yelled.
I looked around from face to face, trying to see who
had done it. The men who had accused him in the barracks weren’t there. It could have been any of them. It
could have been all of them.
No one said anything, and I worried we would all
be whipped for the crime. But the kapo only shook
his head.
“What do I care if you kill one another? You’ll all
be dead soon enough anyhow. You. And you,” he said,
pointing to two of the prisoners watching nearby.
“Drag his body out of here, weight him down, and
dump him in the underground lake.”
No one said another word about him. The kapo s
sent us back to our places, and I chipped away at the
salt wall again until they told me to stop.
That night, I dreamed the salt statues came to life
and set on our captors with their swords, but every
one of the statues had the face of the dead man.
104
Trzebinia
ConcentrationCamp,
1944
Chapter Fourteen
    our Job was to move a pIle of rocks.
    They were big rocks, and it was a big pile. The rocks
were heavy and rough, and we were given no wheelbarrows or gloves. The rocks had to be moved from
one side of the assembly field to another, and the Nazis
yelled at us and beat us if we were too slow or if they
thought we were carrying a rock that was too small
for us. I put my arms around another stone and lifted,
my back crying out in pain. The rock tore and scraped
at my skin as I cradled it to my chest and staggered
across the yard to dump it in the new pile. Then I did
it again. And again. One of the other men stumbled
and collapsed, and the guards fell on him with sticks and
clubs. I hefted another rock and kept working while I
tried not to let the Nazis see how afraid I was. They
were like Amon Goeth’s dogs — they could smell fear
on you, and they liked nothing better than to attack
when you were at your weakest.
    By midday, my arms and hands and chest were so
raw and bruised I couldn’t have gone on, but by then
we were finished. I would have dropped to the ground
but I knew I would just be beaten for it, so I stood
with the others, wobbling on my shaking legs while
I waited for the guards to tell us what new task
awaited us.
    “Good,” the SS officer in charge of us said. “Now
move it back.”
I blinked stupidly, not understanding at first. We
had just worked all morning to move this pile of stones
across the camp, and now the Nazis were changing
their minds? The other prisoners and I looked at one
another to see if we had heard right.
“I said move this pile back to where it was!” the SS
officer yelled. He moved through our group, hitting
us with a stick until we moved. “You will move it
to where it was, and then you will move it again!
Now work!”
Such was life at the Trzebinia concentration camp.
I had been transferred there after a short time mining salt at Wieliczka. Wieliczka