I followed him down the row of barracks. I heard gunfire, shouting, screams. We turned this way and that, and I could see there were crowds ahead. I had no idea where all those people had come from, they looked like prisoners but healthier, not the living corpses I had seen. I didn’t know then that there was another part of the camp where conditions were better. I only knew that there was a great surge of bodies pushing in all directions, and I struggled to stay close to this leader, this haunting man with his rifle and his penetrating eyes.
We turned a corner at the end of the barracks. The back of the structures had these sorts of eaves, and the barracks were arranged in a line, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty. From each eave hung a body.
Kapos, said the leader in my ear.
We continued on, the leader forcing his way through the crowd, but in a way I found almost magical, because in all that bedlam, he did not push or shout, only touched people and spoke into their ears—or maybe this is merely the way I am remembering it. Because the entire crowd was in a mood as murderous as the men who had forced down the door of my barracks-prison, shouting, Get the kapos! And, To the kitchens! And, Feed us, you bastards! Everyone was shouting. People all but trampling one another in the crush forward, which I soon understood was the way to the kitchen and pantries that had fed the soldiers and guards.
All at once, we were being raked by machine-gun fire. Everyone was screaming. I saw people start to fall—a machine gun was raking the crowd, starting on the far side of the space in which we were caught, a kind of plaza in front of a large building. There was something horribly synchronized about the way people fell, one section after another, dominoes falling, one area and then the next around the plaza: people shrieking, bloodied, downed. I looked up to see where the fire was coming from—it is a stupid reaction but irrepressible; something deep in your nerves wants to know, Who is killing me? I looked up, and I saw, standing on the roof of the building, a guard.
My guard. And at that moment, he saw me. And, for a shaved speck of a second, he hesitated—took his finger off the trigger. Because once they rape you more than twice, something in them adopts you, as a sort of pet, or at least a belonging, a possession. They make some animal connection, even if it is only disgust, or dominance, or a desire to prolong the time of possession. He saw me, my face, my body, the body he had owned, dominated, violated—and, for a mere skip in the progression of time, he backed off on the trigger.
I ducked. Beside me, the leader ducked. And everyone in our quadrant—no, not a quadrant; what do you call the smallest slice of an area? Everyone in our tiny angle also ducked. And was saved.
That shaved second now over, the machine gun resumed its raking to the right of us: the screaming and the falling and the dead.
The leader, next to me, stood and aimed his rifle. A miraculous shot! My guard fell dead.
Was that the one who took you? the leader said into my ear.
How did you know? I said in my broken Yiddish.
He only smiled and said, You saved my life.
89.
How did he know that? said Michal. Among all the things one could say after such a narrow miss with death: Why that? Why the belief that I had saved him?
I never knew. I only knew there was some … potency about the man, some aura that made him seem more than real, charmed. You will see this in all the stories of us survivors: improbable moments like the one I just described, events that turn on luck, on nonsensical holes in the fabric of logic, tears in reality itself. Otherwise, if we had followed the inevitability of normal events, one thing expected to follow another, the way the world works most of the time, we would be dead. There would not be that moment when the guard hesitates. The disgusting tenderness the tormentor feels for the object of his evil deeds—it could not exist. A small, compact man should not be able to take aim with a standard-issue rifle, and, with one clean shot, kill the man determined to kill us.