The Dentist of Auschwitz
Postscript
Surviving as a prisoner of the Nazis was a hard and bitter
struggle. In the face of the generous freedoms in America, our
persecution was even more difficult to translate. I felt pain,
lots of pain, but I had to suppress it. I envied everyone
everywhere who had escaped this terrible ordeal. In America in
1949 people had already heard of Hitler and his deeds and were
not eager to hear more. Only later generations wanted to know
what had happened to the European Jewry. By this time a new term
had arisen to identify the Nazis' mass murder and torture of
millions of European Jews: Holocaust.
*
My priority, of course, was practicing dentistry. I studied
English and applied for admission to Tufts Dental School. Hearing
of my experiences with dentistry, the dean, Dr. Joseph Volker,
said that he regretted to advise me that an act of Congress, the
so-called GI Bill, offered preference to the returning soldiers
and that several years might go by before my application would be
acted upon. It was not realistic for me to wait, as I expected my
fiancée, soon to be my wife, to come to the United States soon.
One day, while in a Boston hospital waiting room
experiencing the discomfort of abdominal pains that still plagued
me, I was offered a job in sales by the comptroller of an
electronics firm. I held that job for two years. Then, with my
brother's, my father-in-law's, and my wife's help, I established
my own company. In 1953, at the time of the Korean War, Tufts
Dental School encouraged me to reapply for admission. My firm
grew, however, and was successful. I remained a businessman until
1987. My brother, unfortunately, died in 1965 at age fifty-one.
In 1972 I accompanied Else to Hamburg, where she was called
to testify in a Nazi's trial. By then Germany had gone through
various stages in dealing with guilt. After many denials there
was slow admittance. The most hopeful signs came in the 1960s,
when West Germany perceived its obligation and began to help the
Jewish survivors and the emerging state of Israel. Attitudes
changed, but not all for the better. Some Germans remained true
to nazism's undemocratic principles, championing the idea that
"enough is enough." This is not to mention the neo-Nazis, whose
threats are still the most unsettling. Of course, it would be
unfair not to mention the many people who committed the past to
memory and supported true democracy.
After Else testified, we rented a car and drove from Hamburg
to Neustadt. I wanted to know the exact place of the Cap Arcona
catastrophe. A lot had changed there. One person directed us to a
little hill in nearby Timmendorf. We walked along the shore and
soon saw a sign in front of a set of stairs leading up a hill.
There, tucked away, was a cemetery, overgrown and neglected, with
a huge single grave of the victims who had washed ashore. The
sign listed their nationalities only. Next we found another
cemetery, in which the markers gave names from around the world.
One placard told of the tragedy of the ships. Another listed the
nationalities of all the victims. The entire area was overgrown
with weeds. Compared with the crime it symbolized, it seemed
rather obscure. The tragedy of many years past stared us in the
face. I stood confused and bewildered. Those who perished there
were not just prisoners: they were tough, tenacious, and
unrelenting fighters, with hearts stubborn enough to survive all
the Nazis cast upon them. Yet they died on the very doorstep of
freedom.
We later stopped at a small house that seemed to be a post
office. I walked in and saw a small window with an elderly man
behind it. Besides him no one was there. I thought he would
remember. I asked him how long he had been living here. "All my
life," he answered.
I decided not to say who I was. I would just act mildly
interested, as any tourist would. I said, "I noticed a cemetery
up the hill. I understand that a lot of people perished here?"
He stepped away from the window and came to me. He led me to
the door, pointed at the bay, and said, "Three ships sank here,
and thousands of people drowned. I wasn't here when it happened,
but for years bones drifted up to the shore. Many a time I found
some myself on the beach." I was here on a pilgrimage, to recover
all the secrets he had willingly shed. But then an elderly woman
came in, and the man greeted her. I knew that our conversation
was over and that this was all I would learn from him. I left
with a heavy heart full of painful memories. I had revisited a
nightmare.
In July 1985 I joined a group of Jewish men and women from
the United States on a fact-finding mission to Eastern Europe. We
went to Poland. Each site brought back more bitter memories. This
is where it all began. At Auschwitz, where civilization once
ceased, time and weather had rotted the structures and
watchtowers of the camp. Children now played there, unconscious
that they were walking on the same spot where thousands of Jewish
kids took their last steps. Lawns and houses had replaced the
once bare landscape. In Birkenau lay shambles of the noxious
crematorium. The sign over the gate, "Arbeit Macht Frei," obscene
and offensive, was still there. There were many tourists reading
on a marker that four million people had been killed there. It
didn't tell the real story.
The Block Smierci, the death block where I saw the showcase
of inhumanity, was most poignant: stacks of clothes, shoes of all
sizes--large, small, and even tiny baby shoes--suitcases with
names, mounds of human hair, eyeglasses, canes, teeth, and other
personal objects. I had not seen this before. It filled me with
so much pain that I couldn't fathom it.
Outside the block, I stood transfixed and looked up to the
sky. Where are the souls of the millions of people who rose up in
ashes? Now, I thought, the guilty prosper, raise families, and
are good fathers and grandfathers.
I went to the museum's archival offices. When I gave my
name, Tadeusz Iwashko, the archivist, said to me. "We know who
you are. You were the dentist in Auschwitz III, Fürstengrube."
Then he reached out and pulled a book from a shelf. Its title was
Hefte von Auschwitz. "Look inside," he said. "You'll find your
name and number there, and your father's and brother's." I read
with glassy eyes my name, Bronek Jakubowicz, number 141129, and
the numbers of my father and brother. Another note told of my
posting as a dentist in Fürstengrube.
To fulfill a secret desire within me, I went to my former
home, the little village of Dobra, where I was born and lived for
nearly twenty-two years. When I was arrested in 1941, I left
there with bitter memories. After the war, not a single Jewish
person returned to Dobra, where Jews had lived for five hundred
years. The gravestones from the Jewish cemetery paved the village
sidewalks. I sat for a long time in silence, gripped with pain.
Then I began to cry.
When I raised my head, an old woman with a weather-beaten
face stared at me. "I live just a couple of houses from yours. I
knew your mother very well before she and your sister, Pola, were
deported. Esther said to me, 'Milka! If we are to see one another
again, it will have to be in the other world.'" An irony suddenly
struck me: Dobra means good in Polish.
I drove the road to Chelmno that my sister and mother were
once driven along. Suddenly Dr. Schatz's confession unfolded
before my eyes. There Mama and Pola suffocated, and there they
died.
Despite the sunny day Chelmno seemed bleak and dreary. It
was a painfully morbid and desolate place. Four hundred thousand
Jews were killed there, and in retaliation for the mid-1942
assassination of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, two
thousand Christian children from Lidice, Czechoslovakia, were
also murdered. One monument depicted the twisted faces of
victims. With gut-wrenching indignation I read what was below,
words written by the few Jews kept in a room to process the
bodies arriving daily for the crematorium: "We are writing with
our blood to let the world know that these are our last days.
Here we are being killed by bullets and gassed--our bodies
burned--our ashes are being spread in this forest!" Above this
was a single giant word, Pamitamy (Remember). I will remember
the images of that day forever.
Chelmno's crematorium was capable of turning 5,000 bodies
each day to ashes, I also read, more even than those in
Auschwitz. The maximum at Auschwitz was 4,600. Here were the
souls of my mother and my sister!
Seeing Chelmno was more painful for me than being at
Auschwitz. A few German students were standing there at the
monument, also visibly moved. I wondered how their fathers and
grandfathers would explain this to them.
I left the country where my family and my ancestors had
lived for years, relieved that I did not live there anymore. I no
longer looked upon Poland as my home, and I had forever cut my
ties with my former homeland. I returned to Boston with a renewed
spirit, with a sense of homecoming.
I still can't believe that all of this happened to me--in
one lifetime. I have not spent much time examining the unanswered
questions: Who was to blame for this? Could any of it have been
prevented? If it could have been, why wasn't it? These and many
other remaining questions are the assignment for the future.
Perhaps more light is necessary to explain this stormy phase in
our people's history.
*
I am the least important person in this book. It is the memories of the
events that overtook us that must be remembered.
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