The Horse Adjutant It was urgent that I get out of Birkenau as soon as possible. Anything would be better than this place. Block 28 was run by a good man. I can’t remember his name, except that he was French. Every day I still went to the general assembly. Since I was young and was unassigned to a permanent job, it was imperative during these assemblies that I be given work. Wiktor warned me. “You must be functional to the Nazis. Without a purpose, they would have little reason to give you room and board.” I had many jobs, none were good. I liked the carpentry shop because it was inside, out of the cold, and more im- portantly, I could get an extra piece of bread with a little soup there. Feeling stronger, I went to help build the railroad tracks again. I was laying the rails again. This time, I worked with both prisoners and civilians. The civilians would drive the spikes with sledgehammers to set the rail while we prisoners would use tamping stones to help level the iron bars for a smooth operation. The kapo set the pace. He would shout to a group of us, “Pick up the rail.” Since I was the tallest, it felt as if I car- ried most of the weight. We carried it towards where it needed to go. The wooden shoes made this much harder. Then the kapo shouted, “Put it down.” The prisoners quickly let go of the rail. If I hadn’t let go right away, I would have been crushed. To survive a single day took every ounce of my energy and wits. I would be here for months. Insanity would be saner than this reality. Without help soon, I was surely doomed. Wiktor was my only hope. The rules were so strict there was no way to follow them without getting a beating. Guards would yell, and slug you with clubs, all for what seemed to be no reason other than to appease their sadistic appetites. When a large transport arrived with more hapless people, the blocks were closed. During that time, no one could walk outside. The blocks were closed frequently. The selection process was brutal for each new transport. Few were saved. There was never any place to just sit down, except the wooden beds at night. If you were too weak or if you fell down, you were as good as dead. If all of this was not brutal enough, for a while I was assigned to the Straf Komman- do, prisoners who were being punished. I’m not sure what I did to deserve this. Our work detail was outside. We would march through the gates as musicians played. They were prisoners, too. On the way out we were trained to take our caps off and turn our heads in unison towards the SS officer in charge. He would take a count both before we left and after we returned to make sure all of us were present and accounted for. They would not tolerate any escape. Once we walked past the checkpoint, we would turn our head back to forward and put our caps back on. We walked about 3 kilometers to the Vistula River. Our mission was to drain the swamp.
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