Then they were to be sheared. The hair was taken off their heads in seconds. After that, they were stood on stools so that all the hair could be shaved from their bodies, including their armpits and private parts. The stated purpose was pest control, getting rid of lice, but for the SS there was an added benefit: draining the prisoners of a portion of their humanity. Finally, the men were handed clothes: the striped jacket and trousers, wooden clogs and cap of a concentration-camp prisoner.
At each stage, Walter looked less and less like himself. Now he and all those who had arrived in the wagon a few hours earlier looked the same as each other and more like those already here. Still, and strangely, at the very moment the newcomers were losing their individuality, the veteran prisoners began to gain theirs, at least in Walter’s eyes. Slowly he started to differentiate the striped spectres, one from the other. He began to recognise some of their faces. These were not shadows from the underworld, but rather fellow Jews from Slovakia: the son of a rabbi Walter had known, a schoolteacher, the owner of a garage, a librarian, the son of a blacksmith whose party trick had been to bend a coin with his teeth. They were all here.
At the gate of one field, he spotted Erwin Eisler, his old study partner from Trnava, the boy who had defied the rules and illicitly held on to a chemistry textbook. Now, emaciated, he was pushing a wheelbarrow and scavenging for food .
Walter could see that there was a category of prisoner that inhabited a grey zone between captives and captors. These inmates might be dressed slightly differently, with a jacket or trousers that deviated from the regulation stripes, and often wore a green triangle over the heart, which he soon learned was the symbol across the concentration-camp universe for those inmates who were not Jews – whose triangles were yellow – but men banished to a camp following a conviction as a common criminal. A red triangle marked out a political prisoner, pink a homosexual, purple a Jehovah’s Witness, but among these men the colour was almost always green. They were Kapos , deployed by the SS to do the brute work of enforcement, meting out violent discipline to their fellow inmates at the slightest provocation and sometimes for no reason at all. The men who had started clubbing those prisoners fighting for scraps of food from the new arrivals? They had been Kapos . As far as Walter could tell, what they lacked in Nazi rank they made up for in cruelty.
There was one last familiar face Walter would see in Majdanek. It belonged to his elder brother, Sammy.
Walter had not been in the camp long when a friend whose job involved carrying wood between sections told him that he had seen him, that indeed Sammy was in the next field.
Walter could hardly believe it. He knew both his brothers were in the same situation as he was, that they had been earmarked for deportation and supposed resettlement. But here, in the very same camp? Walter had to fight the urge to run that very moment to the barbed-wire barrier that separated one field from the other. But he had learned already that that was to take a lethal risk. Early on, he saw a man, working close by and apparently driven mad in his despair, make a sudden dash for the barbed-wire fence. He could only have gone a few paces when the shot rang out. Walter did not need to be taught twice: he understood that anyone seen near those fences could be killed in an instant. If he was to meet Sammy, there was a protocol to follow, one that demanded patience.
To talk to someone in a different section, you had to wait till dusk, when there were fewer Kapos around. There could be no congregating by the fence, because that too would get noticed. Instead, you had to wait your turn, queuing up away from the wire, out of sight.
The same system applied on both sides of the fence, so that Walter could see a small group forming on the other side of the line, as far away from the wire as he was, waiting in the shadows. But then, in the failing light, he saw it: the tall outline of his brother. A mutual reflex of recognition kicked in. At the same instant, they raised their arms in greeting .
But it was not yet their turn. Walter and Sammy had to watch as two others gingerly approached the boundary for their own moment of snatched conversation. Walter stood ready, a coiled spring. He watched the two already at the wire, waiting for the first sign that their conversation was coming to a conclusion.
At last, the man closest to him, on Walter’s side of the fence, began to turn away. That was Walter’s cue. He strode forward, watching as Sammy did the same. Soon they would be talking to each other, brother to brother. Who would have believed it, here in Majdanek.
But then, in an instant, the quiet of this twilight rendezvous point was broken. From nowhere came a gang of Kapos , clubs aloft. They began hitting the man who had just finished talking to his friend, truncheoning him in the head until he was out cold. Like birds scattering at a sudden sound, all those who had been waiting their turn disappeared into the dusk.
Walter was told the following day that Sammy had been moved to another field. There would be no night-time meet-up. In fact, Walter would never see his brother again. But the memory of that brief salute in the evening light, each raising their arm to the other, brother to brother – that memory would stay with him for ever.
The seventeen-year-old Walter was a quick student, a necessary quality in a concentration camp where the orientation period was measured in seconds. Training had been next to non-existent, beyond a few barked words of instruction on that first day from the Oberkapo , a chieftain among the Kapos but still a nothing in the eyes of the true masters of Majdanek. The Oberkapo had told Walter and the other new arrivals about the ritual of the Appell , the twice-daily roll call, morning and evening. How they were to gather in a square at the centre of the prisoner area, surrounded by the different fields, and line up in rows of ten. Caps off when an SS man approached, caps on when he moved away. They practised in the pouring rain for several hours. They were otherwise not to move a muscle, on pain of death. Any mistake or lapse in order would be punished with a beating.
So now Walter had had an education in two of the several ways people could die in Majdanek. You might be shot or you might be beaten to death. Other methods were also available. The barracks were so badly built, flimsy and cold, and so overcrowded – with sometimes up to a thousand people in a glorified hut meant to house 200 or fewer – that it was easy to get sick. Some barracks had no glass in the windows; many had no bunks at all: inmates had to sleep on the floor. The bunks consisted of nothing more than three long tables, stretching the length of the entire hut, placed one on top of the other. Supposedly that created a set of three-storey bunk beds.
There was a shortage of clothes and of medicine. Even the most basic sanitation was missing: there was no place to wash yourself or your clothes. There was no sewage system. During the day, wholly exposed sewage pits served as latrines. At night, there were large wooden containers in each barracks which functioned as communal toilets. Walter would soon discover that dysentery stalked the camp. Even if the disease did not kill you outright, getting it was a death sentence. Dysentery meant you were deemed unfit for work. And if you could not work, you were dead.
Some would try to defy the disease, lining up for work as if they were fit, only to empty their bowels where they stood. Walter remembered the fate of one fellow prisoner, Eckstein, a rabbi from the Slovak town of Sered’， who caught the disease. It meant that one day he came to roll call a few minutes late. Their captors could not tolerate that. The SS officer in charge ordered his men to seize the rabbi and dip him head first in one of the latrines, submerging his face in sewage. Then he poured cold water over him, as if cleaning him off. Once that was done, the SS man drew his revolver and shot the rabbi dead .