Eduardo Halfon - The Polish Boxer

He was sort of gone. His eyes were glazed over, fixed on the big window, through which we could contemplate the crests of rain falling over almost the whole of the green immensity of the Colonia Elgin ravine. He was chewing on something, a seed or a little bit of grit, perhaps. Then I noticed the top button of his gabardine pants was undone and his fly half-open.

I was at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Near Berlin. From November of ’39.

And he licked his lips quite a bit, as if what he’d just said was edible. He was still covering the number with his right hand while, with the left, he held the whiskey glass. I picked up the bottle and asked him if he wanted me to pour him a little more, but he didn’t answer or perhaps he didn’t hear.

In Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, he continued, there were two blocks of Jewish prisoners and lots of blocks of German prisoners, maybe fifty blocks of Germans, lots of German prisoners, German thieves and German murderers and Germans who’d married Jewish women. Rassenschande, they called it in German. Racial shame.

He was quiet again, and it seemed to me that his speech was like a calm surge. Maybe because memory is also pendular. Maybe because pain can be tolerated only in measured doses. I wanted to ask him to talk to me about Łódź and his brothers and sisters and parents (he had one family photo, only one, that he’d obtained many years later from an uncle who’d emigrated before the war broke out, and which he kept hanging on the wall by his bed, and which didn’t make me feel anything, as if those pale faces weren’t of real people, but the gray and anonymous faces of characters torn from some history textbook), ask him to talk to me about everything that had happened to him before ’39, before Sachsenhausen.

The rain let up a little and a swollen white cloud began to climb out of the depths of the ravine.

I was the stubendienst of our block. The one in charge of our block. Three hundred men. Two hundred and eighty men. Three hundred and ten men. Every day a few more, every day a few less. You see, Oitze, he said as an affirmation, not a question, and I thought he was making sure of my presence, of my company, as if he didn’t want to be left alone with those words. He said, and put invisible food to his lips: I was in charge of getting them coffee in the mornings and later, in the afternoons, potato soup and a piece of bread. He said, and fanned the air with his hand: I was in charge of cleaning, of sweeping, of changing the cots. He said, and kept fanning the air with his hand: I was in charge of removing the bodies of the men who were dead in the mornings. He said, almost announcing: But I was also in charge of receiving the new Jews when they arrived in my block, when they shouted Juden eintreffen, Juden eintreffen, and I went out to meet them and I realized that almost all the Jews who came into my block had some valuable object hidden on them. A little necklace or a watch, a ring or a diamond. Something. Well hidden. Well tucked away somewhere. Sometimes they’d swallowed these objects, and then a day or two later they would come out in their shit.

He held out his glass and I poured him another shot of whiskey.

It was the first time I’d ever heard my grandfather say shit, and the word, at that moment, in that context, seemed beautiful.

Why you, Oitze? I asked him, taking advantage of a brief silence. He frowned and closed his eyes a little and stared at me as if we suddenly spoke different languages. Why did they put you in charge?

And on his old face, in his old hand, which had now stopped gesturing and gone back to covering up the number, I saw all the implications of that question. I saw the disguised question inside that question: What did you have to do for them to put you in charge? I saw the question that is never asked: What did you have to do to survive?

He smiled, shrugging his shoulders.

One day, our lagerleiter, the camp commander, just told me that I’d be in charge, and that was it.

As if you could speak the unspeakable.

Though a long time before, he went on after a sip, in’39, when I’d just arrived at Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, our lagerleiter found me one morning hidden under the cot. I didn’t want to go and work, you see, and I thought I could stay all day hidden under the cot. I don’t know how, but the lagerleiter found me hidden under the cot and dragged me outside and started beating me here, at the base of my spine, with a wooden or maybe an iron rod. I don’t know how many times. Until I passed out. I was in bed for ten or twelve days, unable to walk. From then on, the lagerleiter changed the way he treated me. He said good morning and good afternoon to me. He told me he liked how clean I kept my cot. And one day he told me I’d be the stubendienst, the one in charge of cleaning my block. Just like that.

He sat pensively, shaking his head.

I don’t remember his name, or his face, he said, then chewed something a couple of times, turned to one side to spit it out, and as if that absolved him, as if that might be enough, added: He had very elegant hands.

I should have known. My grandfather kept his own hands impeccable. Once a week, sitting in front of the increasingly loud television, my grandmother removed his cuticles with little tweezers, cut and filed his nails, and then, while she did the same to the other hand, he soaked them in a tiny dish full of a slimy transparent liquid that smelled like varnish. When both hands were done, she took a blue tin of Nivea and spread and massaged the white cream into each of his fingers, slowly, gently, until both hands had absorbed it completely, and my grandfather would then put the black stone ring back on the little finger of his right hand, where he’d worn it for almost sixty years, as a sign of mourning.

All the Jews gave me those objects they brought in secretly when they entered Sachsenhausen, near Berlin. You see. Since I was in charge. And I took those objects and negotiated in secret with the Polish cooks and obtained something even more valuable for the Jews who were coming in. I exchanged a watch for an extra piece of bread. A gold chain for a bit more coffee. A diamond for the last ladleful of soup in the pot, where the only two or three potatoes had always sunk.

The murmur on the roof tiles started up again and I began to think of those two or three insipid, overcooked potatoes that, in a world demarcated by barbed wire, were so much more valuable than the most splendid diamond.

One day, I decided to give the lagerleiter a twenty-dollar gold coin.

I took out my cigarettes and started toying with one. I could say I didn’t light it out of sorrow, out of respect for my grandfather, out of courtesy for that twenty-dollar gold coin, which I immediately imagined black and rusty. But I’d better not.

I decided to give a twenty-dollar gold coin to the lagerleiter. Maybe I thought I’d earned his trust, or maybe I wanted to get on his good side. One day, there was a Ukrainian among the group of Jews who came in, and he slipped me a twenty-dollar gold coin. The Ukrainian had smuggled it in under his tongue. Days and days with a twenty-dollar gold coin hidden under his tongue, and the Ukrainian handed it over to me, and I waited until everyone had left the block and gone out to the fields to work and then I went to the lagerleiter and gave it to him. The lagerleiter didn’t say a word. He simply put it into the top pocket of his jacket, turned around, and walked away. A few days later, I was awakened by a kick to the gut. They pushed me outside, and the lagerleiter was standing there, wearing a black raincoat and with his hands behind his back, and then I reacted and understood why they kept punching and kicking me. There was snow on the ground. No one spoke. They threw me in the back of a truck and closed the door, and I was half-dozing and shivering the whole way. It was daytime when the truck finally stopped. Through a crack in the wood I could see the big sign over the metal gate. Arbeit Macht Frei, it said. Work shall set you free. I heard laughter. But cynical laughter, you see, dirty laughter, mocking me with that stupid sign. Someone opened the back of the truck. They ordered me to get out. There was snow everywhere. I saw the Black Wall. Then I saw Block Eleven. It was ’42 by then and we’d all heard about Block Eleven at Auschwitz. We knew that people who went into Block Eleven at Auschwitz never came out. They threw me into a cell and left me there, lying on the floor in Block Eleven in Auschwitz.