The Sunflower Page 3

  Large concrete containers were arranged around the courtyard and they seemed to be filled with bloodstained bandages. The ground was covered with empty boxes, sacks, and packing material which a group of prisoners was busy loading into trucks. The air stank with a mixture of strong-smelling medicaments, disinfectants, and putrefaction.

  Red Cross sisters and medical orderlies were hurrying to and fro. The askaris had left the shady smelly courtyard and were sunning themselves on the grass a short distance away. Some were rolling cigarettes of newspaper stuffed with tobacco—just as they were wont to do in Russia.

  Some lightly wounded and convalescent soldiers sat on the benches, watching the askaris, whom they recognized at once as Russians in spite of the German uniforms they wore. We could hear them inquiring about us too.

  One soldier got up from the bench and came over toward us. He looked at us in an impersonal way as if we were animals in a zoo. Probably he was wondering how long we had to live. Then he pointed to his arm, which was in a sling, and called out: “You Jewish swine, that's what your brothers the damned Communists have done for me. But you'll soon kick the bucket, all of you.”

  The other soldiers didn't seem to share his views. They looked at us sympathetically and one of them shook his head doubtfully; but none dared to say a word. The soldier who had approached us uttered a few more curses and then sat down again in the sunshine.

  I thought to myself that this vile creature would one day have a sunflower planted on his grave to watch over him. I looked at him closely and all at once I saw only the sunflower. My stare seemed to upset him, for he picked up a stone and threw it at me. The stone missed and the sunflower vanished. At that moment I felt desperately alone and wished Arthur had been included in my group.

  The orderly in charge of us finally led us away. Our job was to carry cartons filled with rubbish out of the building. Their contents apparently came from the operating theaters and the stench made one's throat contract.

  As I stepped aside to get a few breaths of clean air, I noticed a small, plump nurse who wore the gray-blue uniform with white facings and the regulation white cap. She looked at me curiously and then came straight over to me.

  “Are you a Jew?” she asked.

  I looked at her wonderingly. Why did she ask, could not she see it for herself from my clothes and my features? Was she trying to be insulting? What was the object of her question?

  A sympathetic soul perhaps, I thought. Maybe she wanted to slip me some bread, and was afraid to do it here with the others looking on.

  Two months previously when I was working on the Eastern Railway, loading oxygen cylinders, a soldier had climbed out of a truck on a siding close by and come over to me. He said he had been watching us for some time, and we looked as if we did not get enough to eat.

  “In my knapsack over there you'll find a piece of bread; go and fetch it.”

  I asked. “Why don't you give it to me yourself?”

  “It is forbidden to give anything to a Jew.”

  “I know,” I said. “All the same if you want me to have it you give it to me.”

  He smiled. “No, you take it. Then I can swear with a clear conscience that I didn't give it to you.”

  I thought of this incident as I followed the Red Cross nurse into the building, in accordance with her instructions.

  The thick walls made the inside of the building refreshingly cool. The nurse walked rather fast. Where was she taking me? If her purpose was to give me something, then she could have done it here and now in front of the staircase, since nobody was in sight. But the nurse just turned round once, to confirm that I was still following her.

  We climbed the staircase, and, strange to relate, I could not remember ever having seen it before. At the next story I saw nurses were coming toward us and a doctor looked at me sharply as if to say: What is that fellow doing here?

  We reached the upper hall, where, not so long ago, my diploma had been handed to me.

  The nurse stopped and exchanged a few words with another nurse. I asked myself whether I had better bolt. I was on well-known ground. I knew where each corridor led to and could easily escape. Let her look for somebody else, whatever it was she needed.

  Suddenly I forgot why I was there. I forgot the nurse and even the camp. There on the right was the way to Professor Bagierski's office and there on the left the way to Professor Derdacki's. Both were notorious for their dislike of Jewish students. I had done my diploma work with Derdacki—a design for a sanatorium. And Bagierski had corrected many of my essays. When he had to deal with a Jewish student he seemed to lose his breath and stuttered more than usual. I could still see his hand making lines across my drawings with a thick pencil, a hand with a large signet ring.

  Then the nurse signaled me to wait, and I came back to earth. I leaned over the balustrade and looked down at the busy throng in the lower hall. Wounded were being brought in on stretchers. There was a constant coming and going. Soldiers limped past on crutches and one soldier on a stretcher looked up at me, his features distorted with pain.

  Then another fragment from the past recurred to my memory. It was during the student riots of 1936. The anti-semitic bands had hurled a Jewish student over the balustrade into the lower hall and he lay there just like this soldier, possibly on the very same spot.

  Just past the balustrade was a door which had led to the office of the Dean of Architecture and it was here we handed in our exercise books to the professors to be marked. The Dean in my time was a quiet man, very polite, very correct. We had never known whether he was for or against the Jews. He always responded to our greetings with distant politeness. One could almost physically feel his aloofness. Or was it merely an excess of sensitiveness that made us divide people into two groups: those that liked Jews and those who disliked them. Constant Jew-baiting gave rise to such thoughts.

  The nurse came back and dragged me once again out of the past. I could see from the look in her eyes that she was pleased to find me still there.

  She walked quickly along the balustrade around the hall and stopped in front of the door of the Dean's room.

  “Wait here till I call you.”

  I nodded and looked up the staircase. Orderlies were bringing down a motionless figure on a stretcher. There had never been a lift in the building and the Germans had not installed one. After a few moments the nurse came out of the Dean's room, caught me by the arm, and pushed me through the door.

  I looked for the familiar objects, the writing desk, the cupboards in which our papers were kept, but those relics of the past had vanished. There was now only a white bed with a night table beside it. Something white was looking at me out of the blankets. At first I could not grasp the situation.

  Then the nurse bent over the bed and whispered and I heard a somewhat deeper whisper, apparently in answer. Although the place was in semidarkness I could now see a figure wrapped in white, motionless on the bed. I tried to trace the outlines of the body under the sheets and looked for its head.

  The nurse straightened up and said quietly: “Stay here.” Then she went out of the room.

  From the bed I heard a weak, broken voice exclaim: “Please come nearer, I can't speak loudly.”

  Now I could see the figure in the bed far more clearly. White, bloodless hands on the counterpane, head completely bandaged with openings only for mouth, nose, and ears. The feeling of unreality persisted. It was an uncanny situation: those corpse-like hands, the bandages, and the place in which this strange encounter was taking place.

  I did not know who this wounded man was, but obviously he was a German.

  Hesitatingly, I sat down on the edge of the bed. The sick man, perceiving this, said softly: “Please come a little nearer, to talk loudly is exhausting.”

  I obeyed. His almost bloodless hand groped for mine as he tried to raise himself slightly in the bed.

  My bewilderment was intense. I did not know whether this unreal scene was actuality or dream. Here was I
in the ragged clothes of a concentration camp prisoner in the room of the former Dean of Lemberg High School—now a military hospital—in a sickroom which must be in reality a death chamber.

  As my eyes became accustomed to the semidarkness I could see that the white bandages were mottled with yellow stains. Perhaps ointment, or was it pus? The bandaged head was spectral.

  I sat on the bed spellbound. I could not take my eyes off the stricken man and the gray-yellow stains on the bandages seemed to me to be moving, taking new shapes before my eyes.

  “I have not much longer to live,” whispered the sick man in a barely audible voice. “I know the end is near.”

  Then he fell silent. Was he thinking what next to say, or had his premonition of death scared him? I looked more closely. He was very thin, and under his shirt his bones were clearly visible, almost bursting through his parched skin.

  I was unmoved by his words. The way I had been forced to exist in the prison camps had destroyed in me any feeling or fear about death.

  Sickness, suffering, and doom were the constant companions of us Jews. Such things no longer frightened us.

  Nearly a fortnight before this confrontation with the dying man I had had occasion to visit a store in which cement sacks were kept. I heard groans and going to investigate, I saw one of the prisoners lying among the sacks. I asked him what was the matter.

  “I am dying,” he muttered in a choked voice, “I shall die; there is nobody in the world to help me and nobody to mourn my death.” Then he added casually, “I am twenty-two.”

  I ran out of the shed and found the prison doctor. He shrugged his shoulders and turned away. “There are a couple of hundred men working here today. Six of them are dying.” He did not even ask where the dying man was.

  “You ought to at least go and look at him,” I protested.

  “I couldn't do anything for him,” he answered.

  “But you as a doctor have more liberty to move about, you could explain your absence to the guards better than I could. It is frightful for a man to die lonely and abandoned. Help him at least in his dying hour.”

  “Good, good,” he said. But I knew that he would not go. He too had lost all feeling for death.

  At the evening roll call there were six corpses. They were included without comment. The doctor's estimate was correct.

  “I know,” muttered the sick man, “that at this moment thousands of men are dying. Death is everywhere. It is neither infrequent nor extraordinary. I am resigned to dying soon, but before that I want to talk about an experience which is torturing me. Otherwise I cannot die in peace.”

  He was breathing heavily. I had the feeling that he was staring at me through his head bandage. Perhaps he could see through the yellow stains, although they were nowhere near his eyes. I could not look at him.

  “I heard from one of the sisters that there were Jewish prisoners working in the courtyard. Previously she had brought me a letter from my mother…She read it out to me and then went away. I have been here for three months. Then I came to a decision. After thinking it over for a long time…

  “When the sister came back I asked her to help me. I wanted her to fetch a Jewish prisoner to me, but I warned she must be careful, that nobody must see her. The nurse, who had no idea why I had made this request, didn't reply and went away. I gave up all hope of her taking such a risk for my sake. But when she came in a little while ago she bent over me and whispered that there was a Jew outside. She said it as if complying with the last wish of a dying man. She knows how it is with me. I am in a death chamber, that I know. They let the hopeless cases die alone. Perhaps they don't want the others to be upset.”

  Who was this man to whom I was listening? What was he trying to say to me? Was he a Jew who had camouflaged himself as a German and now, on his deathbed, wanted to look at a Jew again? According to gossip in the Ghetto and later in the camp there were Jews in Germany who were “Aryan” in appearance and had enlisted in the army with false papers. They had even got into the SS. That was their method of survival. Was this man such a Jew? Or perhaps a half-Jew, son of a mixed marriage? When he made a slight movement I noticed that his other hand rested on a letter but which now slipped to the floor. I bent down and put it back on the counterpane.

  I didn't touch his hand and he could not have seen my movement—nevertheless he reacted.

  “Thank you—that is my mother's letter,” the words came softly from his lips.

  And again I had the feeling he was staring at me.

  His hand groped for the letter and drew it toward him, as if he hoped to derive a little strength and courage from contact with the paper. I thought of my own mother who would never write me another letter. Five weeks previously she had been dragged out of the Ghetto in a raid. The only article of value which we still possessed, after all the looting, was a gold watch which I had given to my mother so that she might be able to buy herself off when they came to fetch her. A neighbor who had valid papers told me later what had happened to the watch. My mother gave it to the Ukrainian policeman who came to arrest her. He went away, but soon came back and bundled my mother and others into a truck that carried them away to a place from which no letters ever emerged…

  Time seemed to stand still as I listened to the croaking of the dying man.

  “My name is Karl…I joined the SS as a volunteer. Of course—when you hear the word SS…”

  He stopped. His throat seemed to be dry and he tried hard to swallow a lump in it.

  Now I knew he couldn't be a Jew or half-Jew who had hidden inside a German uniform. How could I have imagined such a thing? But in those days anything was possible.

  “I must tell you something dreadful…Something inhuman. It happened a year ago…has a year already gone by?” These last words he spoke almost to himself.

  “Yes, it is a year,” he continued, “a year since the crime I committed. I have to talk to someone about it, perhaps that will help.”

  Then his hand grasped mine. His fingers clutched mine tightly, as though he sensed I was trying unconsciously to withdraw my hand when I heard the word “crime.” Whence had he derived the strength? Or was it that I was so weak that I could not take my hand away?

  “I must tell you of this horrible deed—tell you because…you are a Jew.”

  Could there be some kind of horror unknown to us?

  All the atrocities and tortures that a sick brain can invent are familiar to me. I have felt them on my own body and I have seen them happen in the camp. Any story that this sick man had to tell couldn't surpass the horror stories which my comrades in the camp exchanged with each other at night.

  I wasn't really curious about his story, and inwardly I only hoped the nurse had remembered to tell an askari where I was. Otherwise they would be looking for me. Perhaps they would think I had escaped…

  I was uneasy. I could hear voices outside the door, but I recognized one as the nurse's voice and that reassured me. The strangled voice went on: “Some time elapsed before I realized what guilt I had incurred.”

  I stared at the bandaged head. I didn't know what he wanted to confess, but I knew for sure that after his death a sunflower would grow on his grave. Already a sunflower was turning toward the window, the window through which the sun was sending its rays into this death chamber. Why was the sunflower already making its appearance? Because it would accompany him to the cemetery, stand on his grave, and sustain his connection with life. And this I envied him. I envied him also because in his last moments he was able to think of a live mother who would be grieving for him.

  “I was not born a murderer…” he wheezed.

  He breathed heavily and was silent.

  “I come from Stuttgart and I am now twenty-one. That is too soon to die. I have had very little out of life.”

  Of course it is too soon to die I thought. But did the Nazis ask whether our children whom they were about to gas had ever had anything out of life? Did they ask whether it was too soon for them
to die? Certainly nobody had ever asked me the question.

  As if he had guessed my mental reaction he said: “I know what you are thinking and I understand. But may I not still say that I am too young…?”

  Then in a burst of calm coherency he went on: “My father, who was manager of a factory, was a convinced Social Democrat. After 1933 he got into difficulties, but that happened to many. My mother brought me up as a Catholic, I was actually a server in the church and a special favorite of our priest who hoped I would one day study theology. But it turned out differently; I joined the Hitler Youth, and that of course was the end of the Church for me. My mother was very sad, but finally stopped reproaching me. I was her only child. My father never uttered a word on the subject…

  “He was afraid lest I should talk in the Hitler Youth about what I had heard at home…Our leader demanded that we should champion our cause everywhere…Even at home…He told us that if we heard anyone abuse it we must report to him. There were many who did so, but not I. My parents nevertheless were afraid and they stopped talking when I was near. Their mistrust annoyed me, but, unfortunately, there was no time for reflection in those days.

  “In the Hitler Youth, I found friends and comrades. My days were full. After school most of our class hurried to the clubhouse or sports ground. My father rarely spoke to me, and when he had something to say he spoke cautiously and with reserve. I know now what depressed him—often I watched him sitting in his armchair for hours, brooding, without saying a word…

  “When the war broke out I volunteered, naturally in the SS. I was far from being the only one in my troop to do so; almost half of them joined the forces voluntarily—without a thought, as if they were going to a dance or on an outing. My mother wept when I left. As I closed the door behind me I heard my father say: ‘They are taking our son away from us. No good will come of it.’