"It is not an exaggeration, nor merely a metaphor,
to say that the survivor's identity includes the dead."
Terence des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death
Camps (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1976), p. 38
Roll Call
When it lasts too long at time it means that there is
something wrong. An error in the count or danger. What kind of danger?
One never knows. Danger.
An SS approaches, whom we recognize
at once. The doctor. Immediately, the stronger women slip to the front,
the bluest ones pinch their cheeks. He draws near, looks us over.
Is he aware of the gripping anxiety that fills us under his stare?
He passes by.
We can draw breath again.
Further on, he halts at the ranks
of the Greek women and asks, "Which are the women between twenty
and thirty who have given birth to a living child?"They must
renew their supply of guinea pigs in the medical-experiment block.
The Greek women have just arrived.
As for us, we have been here much
too long. A few weeks. We are too thin or weak for them to cut open
our bellies. (p. 53)
The
Dummy
On the opposite side of the road lies a piece of land
where the SS train their dogs. You can see them go there, with their
dogs on a leash, tied two by two. The SS at the head of the line is
carrying a dummy. It is a large stuffed doll dressed just like us.
A discolored striped suit, filthy, too long in the sleeves. The SS
holds her by one arm. He lets the feet drag, raking the gravel. They
even tied canvas boots onto her feet.
Do not look. Do
not look at the dummy being dragged on the ground. Do not look at
yourself. (p. 89)
Roll Call
It is endless this morning.
The blockhovas are bustling about,
counting and recounting. The female SS in their capes go from one
group to the next, step into the office, exit from there with papers
they are checking. They are checking this human accounting. Roll call
will continue until the numbers come out right.
Taube arrives. He will head the
search. He leaves with his dog to go through the blocks. The blockhovas
are on edge, they lunge out with their fists and lashes right and
left, indiscriminately. Each hopes the missing person is not in her
block.
We wait.
The SS women, cloaked in their
capes, examine the numbers, going over the human additions again.
We wait.
Taube returns. He has the answer.
He whistles softly to call the dog that follows him. The dog is dragging
a woman by the nape of her neck.
Taube leads his dog to the group
from the woman's block. The count comes out right.
Taube blows his whistle. Roll
call is over.
Someone says, "Let's hope
she was dead." (p. 101)
In his book, The Survivor: An
Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, Terence Des Pres, discusses
how 'roll call,' the morning assembling and counting of prisoners,
became a constituent part of many survivor accounts of the death camps.
On p. 134, he writes:-
"At roll call, for instance, or Appel, as
it was called in the Nazi death camps, prisoners had to form up in
the hours before dawn and stand at attention in thin rags through
rain and snow. This occurred again in the evening, and took at least
two hours, sometimes three and four, and every survivor remembers
roll calls which last all night. Prisoners had to stand there the
whole time, caps off, caps on, as SS officers strolled past the ranks.
Any irregularity was punished savagely and irregularities were numerous.
Prisoners fainted, collapsed from exhauston and sickness, simpley
fell dead on the spot. "Those winter Appels," wrote
a survivor of Buchenwald, "were actually a form of extermination...In
addition to those who regularly fell dead during Appel, there
were every day a number who contracted pneumonia and subsequently
died" (Weinstock, 108).
To fall and be noticed by an SS man was to be beaten
or shot, and the universal practice among prisoners was to use their
own bodies to prop up iinmates no longer able to stand. Almost all
reports by survivors include moments at roll-call when an individual
either gave, or was given, this kind of support."
return to Roll Call
Throughout the first section of
Auschwitz and After, entitled 'None of Us Will Return,' Delbo
returns again and again to the image of the dummy, drawn from her
memory of seeing a pile of generic, almost faceless dummies, the type
which are dressed in women's fashions in department store windows,
lying on the sidewalk. Here is the analogy, from The Dummies,
p. 17 - 18:-
" At first we doubt that we have
seen what we've seen. It's hard to tell them from the snow. The yard
is full of them. Naked. Stacked side by side. White, a bluish whiteness
against the snow. Heads shaved, pubic hair straight and stiff. The
corpses are frozen. White with brown toenails. There is something
ridiculous about these cocked-up toes. Horrifyingly laughable.
Boulevard de Courtais in Montlucon.
I am waiting for my father at the Nouvelles Galleries. It was summer,
the sun was hot on the asphalt. A parked truck was being unloaded.
They were delivering dummies for the display window. Each man grabbed
a dummy in his arms and set it down in front of the store's entrance.
The dummies were bare, their joints clearly visible. The men carried
them carefully, laying them down near the wall on the hot sidewalk."
return to The Dummy
