The prisoners were harried at every turn, slaloming between Kapos who would kick them or hit them with a stick or metal pipe if they slackened and SS men who would shoot at the slightest provocation. It never let up, the air crackling with the sound of gunfire or a whip lacerating human skin, prisoners falling dead and still the Kapos demanding the living move faster.
Walter was tasked with shifting bags of cement. A sack was thrown on to his back and he had to run as fast as he could with it, dodging his way through an assault course of Kapos prodding him to move ever more quickly, whipping or hitting him every ten or fifteen yards. Walter saw fellow prisoners fall, only for a Kapo to crush their skull, leaving a corpse Walter had to take care not to trip over. Once he had reached the mixing machine, there was no rest. He had to run back, double time, to get another bag. And then another and another. For hours, it went on, in the heat and the dust, without food or drink or pause.
This was how the men of Buna were worked, tyrannised and brutalised to meet an impossible deadline, men falling to the ground from exhaustion and starvation or else from the bullet or bludgeon of their masters.
Walter barely had time to look up. Still, he could not help but notice a further element to this already deranged picture, one that took it from the cruel to the outright surreal. For the prisoners and their tormentors were not the only players in this drama. Dispersed among them were civilians: besuited men carrying notebooks and folding rulers, for all the world like a team of well-heeled architects inspecting the construction of a new office building or concert hall. These men who appeared not to see them – indeed seemed able to look right through them, even as they threaded their way through a minefield of dead bodies – were not SS officers or Kapos but the engineers and managers of the site’s proprietor, the German industrial conglomerate IG Farben.
After four hours, a whistle blew and Walter could stop. He saw Josef nearby, sunk to the ground, his head between his knees. It was noon, and food appeared. A version of soup, the same as every other day, either potato or turnip , doled out in one bowl containing about a litre, to be shared between five people. There were no spoons . So desperate men, famished from the work and thirsty from the heat, would have to discipline themselves to swallow no more than the two or three mouthfuls that were theirs. Afterwards, the same routine, one bowl between five men, this time containing some ersatz tea.
The thirst built up over the morning was intense. There was a water tap, but once again the prisoners had been warned: it was infected. Anybody who drank from it would die. Even so, there were some who could hold out no longer. They drank from the tainted source , and soon they were dead.
At 1 p.m., the whistle blew again and somehow, from somewhere, they had to find the strength to resume work. Not all of them could do it. Some lay on the ground, where the Kapos would give them a good kicking or clubbing to see if they were faking exhaustion. Often it was not mere tiredness; they were unable to move because they were dead.
Walter and Josef, however, got lucky. They were recruited by a French civilian who wanted them for a less onerous task: twisting metal rods to form structures that would soon be encased in concrete. The Frenchman explained that his patch was about forty yards square and that inside it he was in charge. But if Walter or Josef were to step beyond it, there was nothing he could do: they would be at the mercy of the Kapos and the SS.
Walter believed it because he had already seen that much of the Buna building site was divided into small sectors, perhaps ten yards by ten yards, each guarded by an armed SS man. Whoever so much as stepped outside their sector during working hours was shot without warning for having ‘attempted to escape’ . That occasioned much sport for the officers of the SS and their enforcers. A Kapo would grab a prisoner’s hat, then toss it over the ten-yard perimeter fence, telling him, ‘Run for the hat .’ If the prisoner refused, he would be clubbed by the Kapos for disobeying their orders. But if he did as he was told, he would be shot by the SS.
Thanks to their patron, Walter and his friend were exempt from such treatment. When the whistle blew for day’s end at sunset, they only had to look at the state of the returning party to appreciate their luck. For the living were now shoulder to shoulder with the dead and the dying. Auschwitz rules demanded that any working party of one hundred that had left the main camp had to return in the same number. That meant those who had survived the day at Buna had to carry back with them those who had not: one body between two prisoners, carried on their shoulders like a rolled-up rug. Counting had become a habit, and Walter made a quick tally. By his calculation, every group of one hundred included between five and ten corpses .
They too had to be present for the evening roll call which followed a day’s work. Those who could not stand up to be counted were stacked on the ground in piles of ten. There was a distinct pattern. The first body down would have its legs spread, so that the second corpse could be laid on top of it, though in the opposite direction, with its head between the first man’s legs. The legs of this second man would then be spread, so that a third could be placed on top, facing in the same direction as the first, with its head once again between the legs of the corpse below. That way, each stack would be easy to count: five heads on one side, five on the other . This smoothed the process for the SS considerably. They merely needed to count each stack as a unit of ten. That handily mirrored the pattern for the living, who also lined up in rows of ten in such a way that the SS officer could count them at speed. To count up a barracks that was meant to contain, say, 953 people could be the work of a minute: ninety-two rows of the living with three more in the last row, plus three stacks of the dead. Easy.
With that done, a gong would be sounded signalling that no one was to move. If they did, they would be shot. Now, once the entire camp was perfectly still, a second SS team could check the numbers from each barrack, then bring those figures to the camp commandant who was seated by a table at a central point in a spot by the kitchen block. His team of registrars would add up the numbers and then declare the number of prisoners present in the camp. They did not specify how many were dead and how many were alive . It happened that way every morning and every evening, day after day.
Perhaps because they were young, perhaps because, thanks to their French protector, their work at Buna was lighter than others’， Josef and Walter endured a month or more in a place that devoured almost all who entered. They worked out that, of their initial column of one hundred that had marched to Buna on that first day, only the pair of them had survived.
It meant that they were around for the temporary suspension of the Buna shuttle, as the daily transport of workers to and from the site was stopped following an outbreak of typhus, thought to have originated in the women’s camp . Those prisoners who had somehow endured the back-breaking labour, the hunger and the brutality of the Kapos were now succumbing to disease. The Buna death rate, already high, was climbing; the authorities feared that IG Farben’s civilian employees might get infected. Walter, Josef and the others were reassigned. Their new workplace was the gravel pits.
Located just outside the perimeter, these were natural quarries, deep reserves of gravel for which the Auschwitz authorities had found a use. The gravel would help in the manufacture of concrete posts for the camp. Excavating it was not easy, but they had Jewish slaves for that – including Walter.