Micah showed Geno a picture of his mother, a dark-haired woman with intense, intelligent eyes. The same prominent brows as her son, but scrupulously groomed. She sat at a desk, hands poised on a typewriter, as she smiled for the camera. The smile was distracted though, as if the work couldn’t wait.
“She’s beautiful,” Geno said. “Was she a writer?”
“She taught English, French and German at a high school,” Micah said. “She had an ear for languages. So do I, to a lesser extent. It came in handy.”
At Haidari, the concentration camp outside Athens, the Nazis tortured Eva Kalo for information on her husband’s whereabouts. They flogged her eldest son Nicolaus in front of her to get her to talk. When that failed, they flogged her to death in front of the camp inmates, making Micah and his younger brother, Christos, watch. Then the Kalo brothers were thrown onto the cattle cars heading to Poland. It was February of 1944. Micah was fifteen, Christos eleven.
When the boys fell out onto the platform at Auschwitz, Christos was near death. Micah, on the other hand, looked strangely full of life. A Jewish woman on the train had bitten her own lips until the blood ran, then rubbed the blood on her cheeks as a makeshift rouge, adding false vigor to her skin. She took some of the excess and rubbed it on Micah’s face, pinching him into a portrait of health.
“You can’t save your brother,” she said in Ladino. “Stand up straight. Look strong. They want workers.” She pushed Micah’s filthy hair into place. “You’re handsome. Use it to your advantage and look like a man.”
Cramped for weeks in a square foot of space, Micah didn’t think he could crawl, let alone stand. Somehow, he locked his knees and threw what chest he had out. When German officers came along, shouting orders to the confused crowd, he translated to those closest to him.
“You speak German?” one of the SS said.
“Ja,” Micah said, not making eye contact but not relaxing his posture.
The officer fingered the green triangle on Micah’s shirt. He took Micah’s jaw in his hand and turned it this way and that. “Schönling,” he said. One of his lower teeth was gold.
“What does that mean?” Geno asked.
“Pretty boy,” Micah said.
Christos Kalo went straight to the gas chambers. Micah marched off to be deloused, have his head shaved and his arm tattooed with number 157701. He was given striped shirt and pants with his number and the green triangle, then marched to a zugangblock, a barracks for new prisoners, where they’d wait until assigned to a work team.
“Were you fucking terrified?” Geno asked.
“I felt nothing,” Micah said. “Because feeling wasn’t—”
“Allowed,” Geno said. “Feeling was illegal.”
Micah nodded as lowered the spiral hook into the mixing bowl, dropped the wire guard and turned the switch on. “You make your own laws in times of war, habibi.”
The SS officer with the gold tooth came to the zugangblock the next day, looking for the griechischen Schönling who spoke German.
“I was made a Lagerschreiber,” Micah said. “A clerk, if you will. At roll call at dawn and dusk, when prisoners lined up for hours to be counted, I was the one counting. During selections on the platform, when some were sent to the left and some to the right, I counted. That was my day job.”
He was quiet a long time, rolling rings of dough around his hands. Then he said, “By night I was a pipel.”
“What’s that?” Geno said.
“It doesn’t translate literally. It’s a good-looking boy who gets special privileges. Because he’s the property of a kapo. Or, occasionally, he’s the property of a commander.”
The SS officer was called Heinrich Schultze. He was tall and stern and authoritative, but seemed to lack the streak of brutal sadism so rampant in the Nazi ranks and the kapo underlings. When he smiled, and he often did at Micah, the kindness of the smile seemed genuine.
“Don’t trust that grinning Arschficker,” one inmate muttered under his breath. “Trust no one in here.”
That Schultze might be homosexual was a piece of information Micah wasn’t sure what to do with. At fifteen, he already knew some Greek men bedded other men and he knew the rules about such things. The one getting fucked was the object of derision. The one doing the fucking was merely tending to his manly needs.
Being revolted or squeamish or worried people would think he was a poústis—these were luxuries left far behind in Greece. Micah had aged a decade in a few short months and thrown all useless things like ego away.
During the horrible days in the camp, in between the roll calls and the beatings and the executions. Through the smell of burning flesh and the smoke always lingering in the air. Through the delousings and the inspections and the constant abuse. Through the weak tea, moldy bread or the warm water with rotted vegetable peels floating through like sewage. Through it all, Micah’s new cunning mind, wired for survival, turned the matter of Schultze over and over.
As a piece of blackmail, it seemed useless. Homosexuality was a grave offense in the Nazi ranks, but the value of this secret was dependent on Schultze’s nature as a human being. If he was spoiled by power, brainwashed by ideology and no longer in possession of a soul, then…
I’d just be a hole to him, Micah thought. I’m good for nothing else. He’d fuck me and kill me and no one would know the difference.
But if Schultze’s golden smile were true. If he had a heart beneath that uniform, a scrap of conscience or decency. If he’d led a lonely life of lying and hiding. If he’d seen his kind shunned and jailed and killed. If he identified, just the slightest bit, with the camp inmates because it could just as easily be him. And if he were willing to risk his life for human connection…
Micah turned the problem over and over.
Does he want a hole? Or a heart?
Does he want to fuck me or know me?
His survival goals had shrunk to hours. He never thought about tomorrow. Next week ceased to exist as a concept, as did the words “one day.”
I only have here and now.
I have no power here or anywhere.
Die now or die later, that’s the one choice I can make. Death is inevitable in this place. I’d rather march to the gas chamber knowing I tried everything I could. Rather than trudge along wondering if I’d let Schultze fuck me, could he have done something for me? But it’ll be too late to un-ring that bell.
Bribery was a way of life in the camps, yet it remained a dangerous business. In just a short amount of time, Micah learned it was best not to give up the goods until you had what you wanted. These goods could get both him and Schultze killed.
And what do you want anyway? he asked himself.
The answer was simple: A chance.
The word was luscious in his thoughts, like honey dripping between layers of phyllo in a slice of baklava.
I want a chance to survive. When I march off to the gas, or stand on the stool or look at the gun, I want to be able to say I did everything I could to survive.
Schultze took him to the kitchen the first time. Micah went willingly. He wasn’t afraid of shame or pain. Only that Schultze would kill him afterward. Bent over some boxes and slicked up with lard, he thought about nothing and waited for either the fucking or his life to be over.
“This is unfortunate,” Geno said, pretending to write on a clipboard. “But it’s not our concern.”
Schultze zipped up, handed Micah a rag and allowed him to live. A fortnight later, he took Micah back to the kitchen. The third time, they were interrupted by one of the cooks. Possibly coming down to steal provisions. Schultze kept one hand on Micah’s hip. The other drew his service revolver and shot the cook dead between the eyes. He resumed fucking Micah and afterward they tossed the body into the furnace. Schultze gave Micah a brick of margarine and two salamis to take back to the barracks.
Micah knew the game by now. He turned over the margarine and one of the salamis to the Blockältester, Lazar Nadelman, the kapo in charge of the barracks.
“Mean little prick of a Jew,” Micah said to Geno. “Drunk on power for lack of anything to eat.”
Micah gave the other salami to his block mates, taking only a slice for himself. If letting Schultze fuck him came with privileges, he’d take enough to survive and share the rest, because getting drunk on his own meager power would get him killed when that power was taken away.
And it’s when, not if.
This could end tomorrow.
“Did it?” Geno asked. “How long did it go on?”
“Eight months,” Micah said. He looked at Geno a moment, then down at the work surface. “Don’t knead so angry, habibi.”