The Dentist of Auschwitz
Chapter 12 Traumatized, starved, and soaked with human waste, we
looked to be the inhuman, useless creatures the Nazis had
characterized us as being. It was dark when the train stopped.
Dawn came a few minutes later, and light began breaking through
the windows. We are not at a station. Why did they stop? we
wondered. A few minutes later the wheels began to roll slowly;
then they stopped and rolled and stopped again, screeching.
It was light enough to see distant fences. We must be at a
camp, and at least at the end of this misery. Perhaps the
prophecy of our doom and death was wrong after all? The smoke,
with the odor of burning flesh, that we suddenly smelled we
passed off as the friction of the train's wheels on the rails. As
the locomotive crept forward, we saw strangers on a ridge dressed
in striped clothes with matching berets, walking like zombies and
staring at our train as though they had been expecting us. We
yelled, asking them to tell us where we were. But no words came
back, just a sign from one of them: he slid his hand across his
throat in a cutting gesture. The others that looked at our
caravan twirled their fingers at the sky. We stared, frightened,
in disbelief. We knew that it meant crematories. In the quiet
that followed, a boy of perhaps sixteen asked what the strange
gestures meant. No one answered him. No one wanted to share his
grimmest thoughts. It is hard to describe our macabre mood. The
meaning of the smoke was now apparent. It was not the train. My
father was praying. I no longer thought that God could save us.
My trust in him had ended. My genesis without him had taken place
long ago, in Steineck.
The train rolled on. We passed more uniformed people. They
looked on while SS men held flashlights and other prisoners gave
us more strange signals. Some raised their arms up, mimicking
Hercules. A constant stream of smoke spewed into the air. The
train slowed and stopped.
The doors rolled open and startled us with loud bangs.
"Raus! Alle raus! Alles liegen lassen!" (Out! All out! Leave
everything!), the SS shouted. The cement platform was crowded
with SS men, yelling and waving us impatiently out of the wagon.
"Raus!" they yelled, as their dogs growled, showing menacing
teeth. The word Auschwitz hung like a bad omen in the air. The
impact shocked us. It was a ghastly sound that no one repeated.
We knew that that word stood for selections and death. We knew
that in Auschwitz Jews were turned to ashes. Their net was
closing around us.
People began to pray. "Shma Israel Adonoi Eloheino Adonoi
Aikhod. God is one. God is mighty."
"Raus! Raus! Alle raus!" they yelled with guns in hand.
After being locked in the wagons for days, we had enormous
difficulty in leaving the car while in a panic. Our limbs had
molded to the mass of men in the cars and would not easily
straighten again. "Leave everything on the platform!" the SS
yelled. I only had a coat, besides the rags I wore, and I left
it, but I held tightly to my life-saving dental tools. Bedlum
erupted as SS men tore into us, whipping us for no reason. A whip
swung across my body. "Das auch!" a contemptuous SS man shouted.
"These are a few of my dental instruments," I said, hoping
he would allow me to keep them. Without another word he seized
the box, snatched it off my shoulder, and flung it to the ground.
The treasures that I had carried with me all this time, my fate
and that of my father, lay scattered on the cement platform.
More prisoners in their zebra-striped suits gathered,
watching us from behind the fence. We were ordered to undress and
to leave our clothes on the platform. Carpenters, lawyers,
shoemakers, businessmen, students, and professors--we were just
plain Jews to our captors. They ordered us into the customary
rows of fives. "Rechts schwenk, vorwärts marsch."
The skies were gray and had a strange look of finality. It
was a cool morning, and the stiff breeze blowing across our naked
bodies chilled us deeply. We pressed together, and I held on
firmly to Papa, realizing that if we were separated we would
never find one another. Then the dreaded word "Selekcja!" Polish
for "selection," went like lightning through our lines and sent a
bolt of fear through everyone. We knew the apocalypse was near.
We thought we knew all about Auschwitz's horror, but we were
soon to discover how little we actually did know. Each of us had
been quietly evaluating his chance of survival. To escape from
here, one would have to be Houdini. We had barely taken ten steps
forward when our line slowed to a crawl. We now crept forward,
stepping on each other's heels. Some wept, and others tried to
muster courage to appear strong and look healthy. Papa and I were
several rows away from the bunch of SS men who, with flashlights
in hand, were scrutinizing the naked men before them. I knew that
each step took us closer to our doom and death, as the rails had
predicted. A few more minutes and it will all be over, I
surmised.
We were still moving and were soon to meet the group of SS
men with the flashlights. One Nazi, who appeared to be the
highest-ranking SS officer, wore a spiffy black uniform with a
doctor's badge--a serpent wound around a sword. He was tall and
slim, with a dark complexion. His thick black hair was cut short.
He left no uncertainty that he was in charge. The procedure
seemed well rehearsed. As his assistants paraded a row of
prisoners before him, he made mysterious gestures. Only the
guards understood, and they quickly executed his orders. A blink
of his eyes, a wave of his hand, a twitch of his finger--each
held a clue. Some people were ordered right and others left. It
soon became apparent that one line seemed more fit than the
other.
Two of the five men in the row ahead of us were ordered to
join the weaker line. One of them courageously attempted to
persuade his judge to let him go with the others. "Look! I am
strong," he said. "I can work. I worked on laying rails for more
than two years and did not skip one day." But an SS man shoved
him back in his line. A daily supply of people, demand for labor,
and the availability of room in the barracks were equally
important factors in determining who lived and who died.
Before our turn, a fellow captive whispered, "Lift your
heads. Act strong." The judges asked the first question of me.
What was my age?
"Twenty-three," I said.
"Occupation?"
"Dentist," I replied.
They ordered me to the right, to join the healthier-looking
group. As I stepped aside, I took my father with me.
"Halt! Nur Du!" (Only you), I heard one shout. I knew that
Papa was at their mercy. They asked him his age and occupation.
"Forty-two, farmer," he said.
My father was forty-nine then. I thought it sounded good.
But "Links!" I heard them order. I saw them push him to the
left.
"It's my father," I said, begging them to understand.
"Nein, nur Du geh nach rechts. Dein Vater muß nach links
gehen." (No, only you to the right. Your father must go to the
left.) They had condemned him to death. I tried to beg for their
clemency once more. But I watched in horror as they began to
select people in the next line. I was as close to tears as I
could ever be in camp. They have just orphaned me, I thought.
Suddenly a commotion erupted as one man tried to escape the
platform. He was quickly mowed down by gunfire. In that moment of
confusion, I grabbed my father and tried to take him with me. He
was frozen with fear and did not move. I tugged sharply and
whispered, "Papa! Come with me." He followed. If we had been
caught, it would have been death for both of us.
I still do not understand why none of them noticed me and
stopped us. It all happened purely by chance. In writing about
this incident I must add that survival, all else aside, was
primarily luck. Sometimes more than luck was needed. Sometimes
strange things had to happen, as if one's fate was guided by a
mysterious hand.
We stood there, and each minute was an hour long. I felt as
if I were standing on hot coals. We could hear praying: "O Lord,
have mercy on thy children. We are truly thine and are pure in
heart." But it didn't help. In the end, the doctors were all
powerful. I held on to my father, amazed at what had happened.
Seventy-five of us hopeful people were finally led away. The
billows of smoke rose from the chimneys as the sky brightened.
Our brothers in the other group were also led away, soon to be
silenced.
After walking a hundred meters, we were loaded onto trucks
and driven along a double fence, passing three-story brick
buildings. We saw groups of people marching. Their clothes were
dirty, and they wore striped miners' lamps on their heads. They
were on their way to work. I was struck by the paradox: the coal
they mined might have been used to move the trains that carried
us here. Some looked lifeless, barely dragging their feet. In
front of each group walked someone in the same striped clothes
wearing a black armband, a Kapo.
This camp did not look like any I had seen before. The
outside perimeter was fenced with heavy wire, with barbed wire on
top. Along the inside ran what seemed to be an electric line.
Perched above in towers were green-uniformed Waffen SS. Their
guns pointed into the camp. As we were driven further, we heard
an orchestra playing and people singing. "Today Poland. Tomorrow
the entire world," they sang in German. Each refrain had a
different verse and mentioned a different country. When the
trucks stopped, we heard "We're marching on England today, and
tomorrow on the entire world!"
A sign at the gate read "Stop, high voltage!" Above the gate
another sign read "Auschwitz," and below it, "Arbeit Macht Frei"
(Work makes you free). We knew it wasn't meant to be a promise,
not even a pledge. The truth was that we were here to work until
we died. In front of a small shack a conductor directed thirty
musicians. The scene was grotesque. They followed his baton as if
they were playing in a symphony orchestra.
Once inside, our truck turned left and stopped in front of
one of the huge three-story brick buildings. A smartly dressed SS
sergeant took charge of us. "Down," he shouted, as the rest of
the SS began to enforce his order. I looked at my father. He was
shivering, and his face was blue. We hoped, but we still didn't
know what would happen to us.
Suddenly someone signaled to me. I looked and saw an inmate
waving from the opposite side of a fence. He was staring at my
boots. "You'll have to leave them anyhow. Throw them to me," he
shouted. "I'll take care of you with some extra food when you get
to the camp. I am a Blockkapo," he added. These were the first
words I heard spoken by any prisoner in Auschwitz. It was a
Kapo's introduction.
He wore a clean suit, a dark cap, and the Kapo's armband. I
did not believe him at first. I thought he was only after my
boots. But when the Scharführer ordered us to leave behind
anything we still might have with us, I yielded to the
inevitable. I removed the few photographs that I still had from
one of my boots and threw the boots over the fence to him. In the
aftermath I realized that I did not know how to find him. As it
turned out, it really didn't matter. We were not allowed to mix
with inmates in the main camp anyway.
I looked at my family photographs: my mother, sister,
brother, and Aunt Rachel, Uncle Shlomo, and Aunt Sara. Also I
looked at the picture of Uncle Izchak, whom everyone said I
resembled. There was Uncle Mordechai, Uncle Chaim, cousins Toba,
Balcia, Nachme, Josef, Mayer, and Mendel. Finally I looked at my
grandfather's picture for the last time. Much later, when I
remembered that August day in 1943, it was as if by my leaving
those photographs, my relatives pictured there had also died at
Auschwitz. We saw groups of inmates with their heads bowed low,
and I decided that someday someone should tell the world what I
saw. But, I thought, no epic drama could duplicate the sight that
was before me. No one would be able to find such emaciated bodies
to re-create the scene.
The morning mist remained. More trucks arrived. One group,
also from our train, was from Lenzingen, the camp my brother had
been in. They claimed to have seen him before the selection on
the platform. Papa and I feared for him.
The Scharführer ordered us into the cell block we were
facing. As we entered through a long corridor, we had to pass
other SS men. They searched us once more, but this time they made
us spread our legs and bend over. Further down the corridor, we
walked through brackish fluid that smelled of kerosene or
naphtha. Soon we had the same mixture showered on our heads and
bodies. "Schnell! Schnell!" they urged. We ran like cornered
sheep to avoid the German shepherds. Then we were led to the yard
once again.
The sun shone. It had burned off the fog. Naked and wet, we
were freezing. Scratches and scrapes on our bodies had reddened
from the fluid, and these were painful. Next we were ordered into
another building that had a sign: "Brause" (shower), which we
feared most. The terrible word staring us in the face startled
us. We are not safe, I thought. We are in their concealed gas
chamber. "Los machen!" they yelled, and we were pushed in the
door from all sides. The large metal door locked behind us with a
clang. We were in a large hall. We saw the shower heads hanging
down. The prisoners who were already there stood praying, perhaps
for all of us. We heard another clang, and all became quiet. My
father's eyes were fixed on me. He was thinking, like me, that
this might be our last moment together. My heart raced. Light
rings swirled in front of my eyes. For kilometers and days the
train wheels had warned me of doom and death. That promise was
about to come true. I closed my eyes and stopped breathing,
fearing that the deadly gas would shower down on us at any
minute. A passive silence persisted.
Suddenly I felt a trickle of water. I didn't dare to look
up, afraid the miracle would stop. When I looked around, I saw
that we were all still on our feet--alive. Soon the water flowed
steadily, and it did not smell or taste odd. I gulped down a
mouthful. Water had never tasted so good or meant as much to me.
With a burst of relief, we all felt that a new life had been
given to us. It was our only happy moment in Auschwitz. For Papa
and me, this was the second miracle of the day.
When the water stopped, an inmate nearby said he had seen my
brother in the hall. The man took me by the hand, and we both
elbowed our way through the mass of wet bodies until we saw
Josek. We looked at each other in disbelief. It was a third
miracle! We returned to Papa, who was happy to be reunited with
both his sons. Josek looked considerably thinner than he had when
I had last seen him. His eyes were sunken, and he slouched. His
health was delicate. This was not an asset in any camp. Now that
we had found one another, we vowed to stay together no matter
what.
As the doors opened, we were ordered into the next room, a
large hall that was now a makeshift barbershop. It was full of
inmates sitting on benches. The barbers were also inmates, but
they wore clean, striped prison uniforms. They had crew cuts.
"Sit. Stand. Turn around." Each of the eight barbers ordered
inmates about. I overheard one man telling of an episode he had
witnessed at the railroad station. He was from Vienna, and he
said he saw a man about forty-five years old tell an SS officer
that he had been arrested by mistake. "I fought in the First
World War for Austria and lost both my legs. I am exempt from any
deportation," the man had argued. He showed the officer his Iron
Cross and his documents. The SS man, however, ripped them out of
his hand and shredded them. Then he pushed the crippled man in
front of an oncoming train. Another witness corroborated this
story. "We all gasped," the storyteller continued, "as the train
crushed him."
My turn came, and the barber began to clip me bald. He shook
his head, pondering why so many of us managed to get in alive.
"Auschwitz is full. You were lucky to escape the chimney."
Inmates used the word chimney as a metaphor for being gassed and
cremated. Konzentrationslager, the word for concentration camp,
was difficult to pronounce, so they called it KZ. "Only if there
is a demand for workers does Dr. Mengele pass Jews into camp,"
the barber said, adding, "At times they are short of gas."
I told him that most of us were veterans of other camps,
having spent as much as two years in labor camps near Poznan,
where we worked building railroad tracks. Perhaps that had helped
us escape death.
"I doubt it," he said. Then he went on to tell me that we
were now in Stammlager, the main camp of Auschwitz. He also said
that there were many satellite camps around Auschwitz. "Buna,
Trzebinia, Jawizowiec, Janinagrube, and Günthergrube, just to
mention a few," he said. "Their organization will amaze you."
He stopped talking, but I wanted to know more. He answered
my questions readily. "What is that number you have on your arm?"
"Everyone is known by a number here. You will get one too,
and then," he said, "you'll be known only by a number. You'll
have to remember it and respond to it when you're called."
I saw his number was tattooed. "Where do we get those
numbers tattooed?" I asked.
"You will see where. You'll be tattooed as soon as you leave
here." Then he told me that he had been in Auschwitz for a year
and a half.
"How long can one survive here?" I wondered aloud. That
question puzzled him.
"Auschwitz is a much different place now than it was when I
came here," he said. "When we first arrived here, one sign read,
'You can expect to survive three months here, at most six. And if
you don't like it, go to the fence and end it now.'" That
confirmed my suspicions that deadly electricity did indeed flow
in the inner fence of Auschwitz. He continued explaining that
obeying was an inmate's unalterable duty. "Remember, never walk
in Auschwitz. Run." He then urged me to learn the names of the SS
rankings and use them correctly. "When you pass SS men, take your
cap off and walk in military steps. Play by those rules
regardless how ridiculous they may seem to you." Throughout it
all he kept repeating to me how lucky we were. "At times you have
to have luck here," he said. "Another reason that many of you
passed the selection was because there were no women, children,
or elderly among you." I knew he had survived eighteen months in
Auschwitz, and that left me with a bit of hope. His final
comments to me were "No matter how sick you are, never go to the
infirmary. Working is the best recipe for not dying."
I then knew a lot more about Auschwitz and its special
lingo. KZ meant concentration camp. KB (Krankenbau) was the
infirmary. Kanada referred to the inmate groups that were
gathering everything the arrivals were forced to leave on the
platforms. The Kapos were inmate foremen. Bunker was a penal
place. Sonderkommandos were inmates assigned to special work
details. The barber, though, had dropped words that seemed
strange: horse, rack, and others whose meanings I could not fully
understand.
Naked and shaved from tip to toe, we followed one another
into the next barracks. Pairs of clogs, jackets, and pants were
thrown at us, regardless of the size or fit. "If these don't fit
you, swap with others," the inmates behind the counters told us.
The clothing reeked of the very same brew that we had been
sprayed with earlier. We each received gray-striped underwear and
a striped beret. The jackets were either too large or too small,
and most of the pants pulled up to the chin. Papa, who had never
been without a thread and needle, was helpless, for the button
that was supposed to hold up his pants was missing. Josek's
trousers didn't stay on his waist either. Robbing us of our names
was a way to complete our dehumanization. Our names became
numbers. In time we knew why. Numbers had no faces. They were
much easier to deal with.
When the numbering process began, Josek, Papa, and I
followed one another and received consecutive numbers. We thought
that this would lessen the chance of our being separated. A
prisoner with a tool similar to a fountain pen began to inject a
black dye into my lower left arm. At first it wasn't painful, but
as he progressed, it hurt. When I pulled my arm away, I saw a few
drops of blood over the numbers he had just tattooed. He looked
at me, and I knew he had to finish. Afterward we received cloth
patches with our numbers and were told to sew them onto our
jackets and pants. I became number 141129, my father number
141130, and Josek number 141131. The red triangle on the patch
denoted a political crime. Three yellow corners were added to all
patches of Jewish inmates. In time we learned even to distinguish
what the alleged crime had been. Communists and former fighters
of the Spanish Civil War who fought for a republic and against
General Franco had a triangle pointing down, while the remaining
political inmates had triangles pointing up. Green triangles
denoted criminals, pink represented homosexuals, and purple stood
for Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses. Brown
designated the gypsies. Those alleged to be escapees wore large
black circles on their backs. Because a Jew was simply shot or
hanged when caught escaping, there were no Jews among this last
group. The first letter of one's country name in German--for
example, D for Deutschland, F for Frankreich, and P for Polen--appeared in the center of the patch.
The Kapos were the ones we learned to fear first. Some were
in charge of the blocks in camp. Others went with us to work and
were in charge of us there. Nearly all were non-Jews, and most
were German. They came from a wide variety of backgrounds: they
were con men, desperados, convicted murderers, and petty
criminals. Among them were also former soldiers from the
International Legion. Though some of them had first been at odds
with Hitler, they changed their allegiance when given the
opportunity to leave the jails and become Kapos in concentration
camps. All showed a certain contempt for newcomers and acted as
if all Jews were their enemies. Although they faced the same life
that we did, they seemed to us arrogant and harshly indifferent.
It was amazing how the Nazis had singled us out from the
rest of the inmates. If there had ever been a thread of harmony
between Jews and non-Jews in the camps, we did not see it in
Auschwitz. In spite of our common plight, the others didn't
associate with us. They did not have to fear selections. The gas
chambers were purely for Jews and gypsies.
In assembling this time, we had to follow our numbers in
consecutive order. "Los! Los!" the guards herded us through
Auschwitz. We saw a group of inmates carrying stones in one
direction and another doing the same going the opposite way. They
looked toward us, but I was not sure that they could see us.
Finally we came to the Quarantine Block. We had not eaten in two
days and thought that having passed Auschwitz's symbolic baptism,
our fellow inmates would find enough compassion for us to let us
into the building. But the Kapo and three of his assistants
marched us to the side of the building. There they chilled us
with an unfriendly reception.
"Where were you all this time?" the Kapo growled. He sounded
as if he was accusing us of not having come to Auschwitz sooner.
Next the clerk checked to see if we were all there. He was tall,
about two meters, skinny and bowlegged. He wore a red triangle
with a capital P, which made him a political prisoner from
Poland. His tattooed number was a little over 100000. One of his
ears curled upward, and the other looked as if it was folded
back. Of the three assistants to the Kapo in that block, he
turned out to be the friendliest and the most decent.
In a hoarse, quivering voice, he encouraged us to be
hopeful. "You will probably be sent to an Aussenlager [subcamp],
of which there are thirty-nine here in a forty-kilometer radius."
After two weeks, barring any problems, he said, we could expect
to be sent out to work.
The Kapo, however, was different. When he began to speak, he
demonstrated how, in Auschwitz, men became more aggressive than
animals. He looked well-nourished. He laid down the rules.
"Anyone who leaves this block will receive ten lashes. If anyone
brings food in the barracks, ten lashes. If you leave your bunk
unmade, ten lashes. Missing at a roll call, ten lashes. Stealing,
twenty lashes." By the end of his tirade, we were numb with
rules.
As noon neared, it was time to fetch food, and he allowed us
to go into the rooms. Our pants were still loose. If we couldn't
find something to keep them up, we knew we would get scolded by
the Kapo. Luckily Josek had found a bit of string. Once we were
in the barracks we quickly secured three adjacent bunks. For the
first time since we became camp inmates, we were in a vermin-free
block.
In both Steineck and Gutenbrunn we got our rations
regularly. Here, however, even though we received soup morning
and night, we got bread sporadically. Since no one could venture
beyond the block, stealing was out of the question. Even Mendele,
who had nearly always found ways to circumvent the system, had
trouble. When the block orderly arrived with vats of soup, we
each received two ladles of boiled water with bits of potatoes
and an overcooked turnip in it. We had no spoons and had to drink
from the bowl.
The roll call could last hours. One Sunday, just before
noon, I heard my name being called. I didn't recognize who it
was. I wondered how anyone would know my name. When I came to the
door, I saw a Kapo. I didn't know why he was looking for me.
After confirming that I was Bronek Jakubowicz and from
Gutenbrunn, he said there was a girl outside who had asked him if
he knew a Bronek Jakubowicz. After he described her briefly, I
knew it could only be Zosia.
He said he had advised her to leave, after promising her
that he would find me. I was curious to know how the Kapo had
found me. "She told me when and from where you came, and I knew,
if you were alive, you could only be here in the Quarantine
Block," he said. He considered his mission completed and left.
Our class distinction was such that it would have been too
demeaning for him to stay and socialize with an ordinary inmate
who had just come to Auschwitz. How Zosia knew where we had been
sent I have never learned. Considering the extraordinarily tight
security at Auschwitz, which would have discouraged her from
coming back, she must have realized that she could not have met
me even if she did return. What came back were my memories of our
days together at Steineck and Gutenbrunn.
The Auschwitz veterans looked upon us as greenhorns. They
answered all of our questions with questions of their own. When I
asked a Kapo's aide where I could wash some of my clothes, he
answered, "Where do you think you are, in a sanitorium?"
More people kept coming. We saw tattooed numbers upward of
150000. That meant that almost ten thousand people had been
brought here since we had come. According to the normal pattern,
only 25 percent actually passed into the camp. That meant that in
the two weeks since we arrived, more than forty thousand people
had been transported to Auschwitz. I wondered about the women's
camp and the fate of Balcia and all the others.
One day a few civilian Germans, accompanied by SS men, came
and looked us over. Our good-worker status, however, was
apparently not known to them, and our isolation continued. We
heard of Allied forces landing somewhere in Europe. One day late
in the afternoon, twelve inmates went past our barracks. Usually
inmates inside the camp were escorted by the Kapos, but these men
were led by the SS. Their faces exuded fear. One of our room
orderlies said that they were being taken to the Strafbunker
(penalty bunker). "Few survive a long stay there," he said. "And
if they do, they're physically and mentally broken for life." The
Strafbunker had no light or toilet. It was barely big enough for
one person to stand up in. "They would have been better off to
have gone to the electric fence," the orderly said.
Another day we heard that there was no further need for
inmate workers and we weren't to go anywhere. This was the worst
news we could have been told. Being unneeded meant being
dispensable. Passing Dr. Mengele's selection was just a temporary
reprieve, we thought. We already knew that to remain alive we had
to keep working. Being idle beyond a certain point was a threat
to our lives. I was no longer optimistic that we would ever leave
Auschwitz alive. After the years of living on the edge of
existence, we were resigned to whatever fate had in store for us,
and we didn't look at our lives in any long-term way.
One day the Kapo kept us outside in the cold rain for more
than an hour. When we finally got back into the block, we were
dripping wet. We hung our clothes around the room to dry. When
the Kapo noticed, he asked us who had had that idea. Since we all
did it simultaneously, no one admitted guilt. Then he ordered us
to go outside naked and circle the block. As we passed by him
standing at the door, he swung his whip at us. Mendele was hit
badly, but even though some lashes on his back drew blood, he
didn't whimper. I thought this teenager's heart was made of
stone. Looking around and seeing the rain dripping off of us, I
thought of cattle in a pasture. Here we were treated alike,
driven, herded, and even branded like cattle. Later one of the
prisoners, Moishe Chernicki, came down with a fever and was taken
to the infirmary. No one ever saw or heard from him again.
We had been in this isolation for more than two weeks. The
draconian rations barely kept us alive. When the sun didn't
shine, the camp was draped in the black of the rising smoke.
There had not been a shortage of courage before, but now we were
at our lowest point ever. Reality seemed twisted and out of
shape. At times we stared into space. Some wandered around the
barracks in loneliness. Although we had passed Dr. Mengele's
selection, we were destined to flunk life anyway. Suicides,
though, were rarely heard of here. Only a few Jewish inmates
succumbed in this way. Perhaps our generation's experiences had
endowed us with extra ability to endure. The undaunted believers
still prayed every day. It amazed me how they still remembered
word-for-word the various prayers of shaharith, minhah, and
maarib--the morning, afternoon, and evening liturgies.
Then a number of civilians came to the block. They were
accompanied by Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of
Auschwitz. The consensus of our block supervisors indicated that
they were from I.G. Farben, a large German pharmaceutical company
that already employed prisoners in the nearby Buna camp. At Buna,
the I.G. Farben Company was making synthetic rubber. There, we
were told, the inmate death rate was very high, and they had a
continuous need for replacement workers. We believed that it
could only be better than our present situation. We just wanted
to get out of here.
Finally we got orders that we would leave the camp. A little
after five the next morning, we were each given leather shoes
with wooden soles to replace our clogs. After roll call we were
given a generous portion of bread and were lined up. There were
eight hundred of us who would be workers and twenty-five other
prisoners, including Richard Grimm, who would take charge of us.
We did not know where we were going. Except for Grimm, all the
others had low prisoner numbers. The lowest I recall seeing was
on Klaus Koch, who became our cook. Coincidentally, an SS man by
the same name turned out to be his boss. Most of the workers wore
green triangles, the color designated for criminals, but there
were also political prisoners and even one homosexual bearing a
pink triangle patch.
As we left, Josek and I walked on either side of our father.
I looked up and saw the paradoxical Auschwitz sign, "Work makes
you free." By leaving Auschwitz, I felt that we had a new lease
on life. A large group of people were being led into the camp.
They were gypsies, and I had to think of the contradiction, that
they, people who loved so much their free spirit, were also
chained in Auschwitz. I remembered when I was just a boy how I
loved to listen to the gypsies' music. They would make the violin
cry and laugh at the same time. While still in grammar school I
learned to play the mandolin and had a unique experience with a
gypsy girl. She was about twelve, my age, and very beautiful.
When she came to the back of our house, where I played my
mandolin, she stopped and listened for a while. Then she
persuaded me to come with her to their camp, which was not far
from our house. At first I felt fearful, because I had been
warned that they abducted dark-haired children. But I went with
her anyway and later visited her a few more times. In time I came
to appreciate our differences. I liked the gypsies' communal,
nomadic, exciting lifestyle. By the time they moved away, the
gypsy girl and I were in love. About three weeks later she
returned and insisted on living with us. It was a dilemma for my
parents. Finally, after finding out where her tribe was, Papa
bought a railroad ticket for her and sent her back to them.
We continued marching, seventy Croats and twenty German
Waffen SS with us. They were mostly Rottenführer (privates) and
Unterscharführer (corporals). Ahead of us walked a statuesque and
fearless-looking SS man. He was Hauptscharführer Otto Moll, our
future Kommandant. Rumor had it that Moll had played an important
role in Auschwitz, where in less than six months he had risen
from the rank of sergeant to Hauptscharführer and Kommandant.
This meteoric ascension was due to his skill in killing. He had
pioneered the dropping of canisters of the poison gas Zyklon B
into the phony showers, which he accompanied with his favorite
saying, "Laß sie fressen" (Let them eat).
It was the late summer of 1943, and to have escaped the
Quarantine Block at Auschwitz alive was a metaphor for freedom.
Our fate, we thought, had changed. We had been close to being
pushed off the cliff, and now we had a new lease on life. I felt
resentful as we passed people who were still allowed a near-normal life, and wished I was not born a Jew. I struggled in my
wooden-soled shoes as we walked. It was noon, the sun was high,
and we had just passed by a little town called Ldziny. We were
ordered off the road and told to sit on the ground. There was an
eerie sensation. The grass felt scorched, dead, as if just after
a famine. Anyone lucky to have bread left finished it, and soon
we continued our trek to the north, coming by another camp,
Günthergrube. A few kilometers farther on, we came to the village
of Piast. Not too far from there, visible from the road, was
another camp with a strange name, Janina. In Polish this was a
popular girl's name. One kilometer farther, across the road, were
two more camps. One was Ostland, which housed Polish and Russian
women. The second camp was Lager Nord, which had Russian war
prisoners. Next we came to a place called Wesola, which means
"happy" in Polish. This seemed to be a camp territory. Five
kilometers farther was yet another camp. Most prisoners here
worked for I.G. Farben. Finally we came to Fürstengrube, or
"Noble Mine." This was to be our new home. We were only about
sixteen kilometers from Auschwitz I.
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