to do so, snatched my cap from my head while outside, on the main road, gliding slowly and noiselessly on bicycles in the balmy dusk air, there materialized the figures of three soldiers: a somehow majestic and, I was made to feel, austere sight. It crossed my mind even then: amazing, how long it had been since I had actually come across any soldiers. Only I had to wonder how difficult it would be to recognize the members of that politely spoken, good-humored corps who had greeted us this morning at the train in these men, who listened so coldly, frigidly, and as it were from an unapproachable exaltedness on the far side of the barrier, with one of them making notes in an elongated notebook of some description, to what on this side our block chief (he too with cap in hand) said to them, these somehow almost ominous potentates, who then glided on farther without so much as a single word, sound, or nod. At the same time, a faint noise, a voice, came to my attention, and to my right I noticed a profile straining forward and the protuberant curve of a chest: it was the former army officer. He was whispering in such a way that his lips barely even moved: “Evening roll call,” giving a tiny nod, with a smile and the knowledgeable expression of a man for whom this was all happening in a fashion that was readily comprehensible, perfectly lucid, and in a certain sense, almost—hard to credit—to his satisfaction. It was then that I saw for the first time, with the darkness overtaking us where we stood, the night sky’s hues and also one of its spectacles: Greek fire, a veritable pyrotechnic display of flames and sparks around the entire rim of the sky off to the left. Many of the people around me were whispering or muttering, reiterating: “The crematoriums! . . .” though by now this was little more than the wonder that accompanies what I might call some kind of natural phenomenon as it were. Later, “Abtreten,” the order to fall out, and I would have been hungry, but then I learned that the bread had, in fact, been our supper, and after all, I had already eaten that this morning. As for the barracks, the “block,” it turned out that it was completely bare inside, a concrete-floored place without any furniture, fittings, or even lights, where it again proved, as in the gendarmerie stable, that a night’s rest could only be accomplished by propping my back against the legs of some boy sitting behind me, while the one sitting in front of me rested against my knees; and since I was by then tired out by the host of new events, experiences, and impressions, and moreover drowsy, I soon dropped off to sleep.
Of the days that followed, much as with those at the brickyard, fewer details have stayed with me—more just their tone, a sense, what I might call a general impression, only I would find that difficult to define. During these days too there was always still something new to learn, see, and experience. During these days too, every now and then, I would still be brushed by a chill of that peculiar sense of strangeness that I first encountered at the sight of the women; every now and then it still happened that I would find myself in a circle of incredulous, drawn faces, people staring at one another and asking one another, “What do you say to that? What do you say to that?” and the answer on such occasions being either nothing or almost invariably: “Ghastly.” But that is not the word, that is not precisely the experience—for me at any rate, naturally—with which I would truly characterize Auschwitz. Among the several hundred inmates of our block, it turned out, the man with the bad luck was also there. He looked a bit odd in his loosely hanging prison uniform, his oversized cap constantly slipping down over his forehead. “What do you say to that?” he too would ask, “What do you say to that? . . .”—but of course there was not much we could say. And then I would not have much joy trying to follow his hurried and muddled words. He mustn’t think about, or rather that is to say he could and indeed had to think all the time about just one thing, those whom “he had left at home”