ON THE DARK DAY when the Jews of Wilno were gathered into a ghetto, a tall, athletic, twenty-three-year-old man named Benjamin Weintraub sat down in his room in the presence of his wife and split the heel off his leather knee boot, cut a neat round hole in the inside of the heel, took his wedding ring off his fourth finger, put it in the hollow place in the heel, and nailed the heel back on his boot. The ring was gold and heavy. Inside it were engraved the date of his wedding, 5 IV 41, and the name of his wife, LIBA.
Later the same day the young couple were taken to the ghetto, which consisted of two miserable streets and was divided into two parts—one for “specialists,” who could claim various skills, the other for “nonspecialists,” who had no trade. Weintraub and his wife were put in the “specialists’ ” ghetto, and, although he was trained as a chemist, he was classified by the Germans, quite arbitrarily, as an electromechanic. There were twenty-three thousand people in the “specialists’ ” ghetto, and about twelve thousand in the other. The two streets were so crowded that the Weintraubs had to live like sticks of cordwood in a room thirty feet long by twenty wide, with nearly forty people. The ghetto was surrounded by a high wall and was heavily guarded by German and Lithuanian SS and SD men. Every day Weintraub was taken out into the city with a party to do heavy labor—usually having nothing to do with electromechanics. The work was hard, but he found he was lucky to be doing it: five weeks after the ghetto was formed, all twelve thousand of the “nonspecialists” were taken out to a place called Ponary, twelve kilometers from Wilno, and were killed by machine-gun fire. From time to time there were small “clean-outs” of specialists who were considered by the guards unfit or unruly. They would be taken out in small groups and would simply not return. Weintraub’s mother, father, and two brothers were killed in these clean-outs.
Weintraub had recently come from a hopeful life, and that made the new squalor even worse. He and his wife reminisced: about the night they had first met at Jack’s Sport Club and got on so well because she danced like a professional and he was immodestly willing to admit that he was the best dancer in their students’ circle; of the times they went skiing together in the hills and woods near Wilno; their swims together at the swimming club, tennis on the public courts, volleyball at the university—a healthy, noisy life. He recalled the things he had done well: the day he won the eighteen-kilometer race at Neuwilno in 1938, his having graduated second in his class at the secondary school, his skill in basketball at Wilno University. They talked of the futility of all the ambition he had had—his youthful desire to be a great concert pianist and his hard studies at the Wilno Conservatory of Music, then his more sensible decision to make a decent living as a chemical engineer and the years of preparation at the university. He teased her about how hard he had tried to teach her to sing, sitting at the piano in his own bedroom and struggling with her tone deafness, always finally giving up and playing Beethoven sonatas for her. He told her again and again of the wonderful trip to Finland he had taken as a boy of thirteen alone with his father, and of the incredible waterfall there called Immatra. They remembered their wedding party, only five months before they had been taken into the ghetto. She chided him for his stubbornness, for when she had moved into his family’s five-room apartment at 2 Teatralna Street, he had not let her change a single thing in his room; he had a “sports corner” there crowded with pictures of athletes, and a “nature corner,” with pictures of the Polish countryside in all the seasons.
There had been a time, Weintraub also recalled, when death had been an entertainment, in murder mysteries, his favorite form of reading….
All that life soon faded. Memories of it gave way to a new and absorbing study: how to get away? News had filtered into the ghetto of Jewish partisan groups in the woods near the city, and all in the ghetto dreamed of escaping to them. Weintraub was rather slow to work out a plan, and then it was not a shrewd one.
There were Jewish police in the ghetto, and he thought that if he could obtain a ghetto policeman’s uniform, he might somehow bluff his way past the swarm of SS and SD guards at the main gate. He finally managed to steal a uniform, and on September 6, 1943, two years to the day after being taken into the ghetto, Weintraub, disguised as a ghetto policeman, walked with his wife to the gate. They stopped a few minutes, trying to decide what to do, and as they waited, the car of the ghetto’s ranking SD man, Unterscharführer Kietel, approached the gate to go out. The car stopped for a moment for a guard check and for the gate to open. Weintraub whispered to his wife to jump on the spare tire in the rear. He said he couldn’t go out in uniform because he would be spotted outside too easily. Liba jumped on and clung to the spare. The car started up. Weintraub turned quickly away. About fifty yards beyond the gate, the street curved to the right. Looking back, Weintraub saw his wife drop off just before the curve and dart into a side street. That was the last he saw of her.
Weintraub learned two lessons from Liba’s escape. Thinking it over, he remembered that the Unterscharführer Kietel drove out every day at precisely the same hour, almost to the same minute. The first lesson this taught him was that these Germans were so methodical, so precise, that he might be able to use their precision against them. The other lesson was that an escape had always to be planned from beginning to end. He had not even thought what he would do beyond the gate.
There were at this time less than two thousand Jews left in the ghetto. On September 23, 1943, they were taken to a camp in a pine forest near a town called Klooga in Estonia. Klooga was a labor camp. When the prisoners arrived, there were signs denoting various professions stuck in the sandy soil in front of a barracks. The Jews were told to group themselves around the signs according to their skills. Weintraub had learned from the experience of the “nonspecialists” the importance of declaring a profession. Seeing the pine woods all around the camp, he went to the sign for carpenters.
To inhibit escape a barber ran clippers in a straight, naked line from the middle of each man’s forehead to the nape of the neck. The prisoners were given unmistakable striped blue canvas shirts and jackets or coveralls. And they were given numbers. From this time forward Benjamin Weintraub was No. 339, Klooga. A cloth label on his shirt declared his number. On the label, too, was a Star of David.
No. 339 at Klooga and all the other unlucky numbers got up at five a.m., had a single cup of burnt chestnut ersatz coffee, started work at six and had a half-hour rest at noon, during which they were given an unvarying bowl of soup, worked on until dark, and then were given a few slices of bread and twenty-five grams of a margarine which stank so that many were unable to eat it.
The work varied. The prisoners were set to building wooden sheds and shops. Later they made concrete blocks and tank obstacles. Some made wooden shoes for shipment to Germany. Some cut wood. Some loaded the camp’s products into freight cars on a siding about half a mile from the camp.
There was always too much work, there was never enough sleep, and the craving for food was constant and sickening. But the worst thing of all was the mental depression the prisoners felt. Their guards were trained in impersonality and seemed to take pleasure in hurting flesh and bone. The prisoners gradually lost all hope. The urge to survive drove some of them to degradation—they informed against their fellows, some even curried favor with their tormentors.
No. 339 was outstanding among the prisoners. The superiority at skiing, swimming, and basketball of which he had once boasted so immodestly had trained him well for the camp. He kept initiative and even a kind of hope long after the others lost it. Since he was strong and apparently so cheerful, the Germans began to trust him and put him in command of work parties.
He rewarded their trust by planning day and night to escape, not alone but with many others. First he simply observed the daily habits of the Germans—where they walked, their punctual hours of changing guards, of eating, and even of going to the bathroom. Then he began small reconnaissances. He would sneak out of his barracks at night and walk around a while, feeling out the vigilance of the guards. Gradually he began widening his movements.
He began going out through the wire at night at a place where sentries left a gap in their patrol, and he would make his way to the town of Keila, twelve kilometers from the camp. Then he began to have luck. He met some Estonians who were willing to risk their lives by giving him bread, butter, and cheese.
Others, on his instructions, began sneaking out, too. Several were caught and soon disappeared. The Germans said they had “gone to Riga.” A terrible whisper went around the camp that there was a gas chamber and crematorium at Riga. “Going to Riga” became the synonym, among the prisoners, for death.
Many lost the will to live and virtually starved themselves to death; when they became too weak to do any kind of work two German doctors, named Bottmann and Krebsbach, put them permanently to sleep with a drug called evipan. Bottmann was not a very good doctor and probably knew it, and very likely it was an inferiority complex which made him, one day, flog a Jewish surgeon named Ovseizalkinson within an inch of what was left of his life. The Germans devised an ingenious whipping cradle whose straps and buckles placed victims in the best possible position to have one man sit on the head while the other whipped the buttocks. For the slightest offenses prisoners were given twenty-five lashes. The number twenty-five, like the word “Riga,” came to have an awful significance among the prisoners.
There were a few cases of wanton cruelty. One winter night, when a number of Jews built a bonfire outdoors to warm themselves without having asked permission, the Unterscharführer Gendt went berserk with an ax. He killed, among others, a man named Dr. Fingerhur, who had been one of Wilno’s outstanding gynecologists. One of the guards had a vicious dog which he occasionally sicked on prisoners. One day some dreadful-looking shadows of people limped into the camp and said they were survivors of a typhus epidemic at another camp near Narva, hundreds of kilometers away, and that the Germans had made them walk all the way along the coast to Klooga. They described how SS guards had disposed of habitual stragglers by drowning them in the sea.
Practically the only thing that kept the prisoners alive now was a sense of common fate and a lingering defiant sense of humanity. They exchanged occasional messages that symbolized these senses. For instance, on his wife Liba’s birthday that year Weintraub was handed a note by a guard. It read, “To Prisoner 339 from 359, 329, 563, and 350: We, your comrades, greet you on this day and hope that you may see your wife as soon as possible and that you may then live at her side until her blonde hair turns to gray.”
The hopes that 339 had for an escape were jarred one freezing day early that year. He was walking through the camp with a long board on his shoulder when his right foot slipped on a patch of ice and brought him down. His weight fell on the right leg and broke it badly just above the ankle. He was in bed for two and a half months.
When his leg mended, No. 339 was afraid he might have lost his contacts in the village of Keila, but he found that he was able to pick them up again quickly. He was lucky particularly in gaining the trust of a man named Karl Koppel who lived at 58 Hapsal. Koppel was a great help to 339. He managed to get some pistols and some ammunition. He gave the pistols, one by one, to 339. Koppel provided fifty rounds of ammunition per weapon. When he got each pistol back in the camp, 339 went in the dark to the woodpile, only a few feet from the barracks, hauled a log out from low in the pile, took it into the barracks to his bunk, scooped out a hollow with a chisel stolen from the carpentry shop, put the pistol in it, and then took the log back out and returned it to its place in the pile.
Koppel had given 339 only seven revolvers when a miscalculation upset the whole plan. The miscalculation 339 made was not of his adversaries but, ironically enough, of his fellow Jews. He told too many. The word spread. With the help of the whipping cradle the Germans found out a few names. Then, apparently at random, they made a list of almost five hundred Jews. Perhaps they were uncertain who the real leaders were; perhaps the Germans needed manpower too much. At any rate none was executed. Instead all five hundred were taken to another camp at Lagedi, about fifteen kilometers from Tallin.
Here 339 had to start the whole process from scratch. This time he told only his most trusted friends. Ironically, the camp that was intended to punish the escapists turned out to be less severe than Klooga. The SS man in charge was no less harsh personally than the SS man at Klooga. The difference was that he had just been recalled from the Russian front. He knew how the war was going. He had heard about the Moscow declaration on war criminals.
Early in September of that year the Russians launched an attack against the Baltic States. No. 339 and the others were given no war news at all and they did not know what was happening when, on September 18, thirty trucks driven by SD men came to camp. That day most of the men were out constructing anitank bunkers for Tallin. No. 339 was doing some work in the camp with eighteen other men.
The nineteen prisoners in the camp were gathered together near the front gate. The SD men began to argue. No. 339 knew enough German to understand that they were arguing whether to take the nineteen right away or wait for all the prisoners to come back in. He heard the word Riga and the word Klooga. He saw that the guards were taking part in the discussion and that all the Germans were ill at ease and confused.
He was standing near the gate. At a peak in the argument he bolted. He ran straight across the road, where the trucks were waiting, into some woods. Then, banking on the thorough Germans to comb the woods, he doubled back and went into the back door of an Estonian house that stood only a few yards from the camp gate. He persuaded the Estonian who was there to lend him a coat and cap. He took up a piece of material, a needle, and some thread, and told the Estonians to say that he was a tailor who worked there. He thought that if the house were searched the job might be done by one of the visiting SD men, who would not recognize him.
In a few minutes he looked out of the window and saw his eighteen comrades being bundled into a truck. The truck drove off.
The others came back from their work after about two hours. They were not marched into the camp at all but were lined up in groups of about thirty beside the trucks on the road. This time the thorough Germans took no chances. The drivers and guards formed a huge ring around the trucks, the prisoners, the road—and the house in which 339 was trying to hide. Eventually some of the camp guards came in the house, recognized 339, and took him out.
Something made 339 edge his way to the last truck. That instinct saved his life. The last truck left at about nine o’clock in the evening. Along the way it broke down. After it was repaired the driver and guard were at a loss what to do. They inquired of some officers they met along the road. The officers suggested that they take the truckload to Tallin jail.
The truckload of prisoners arrived at the Tallin jail early in the morning and slept there a few hours. In the morning they were bundled back in the truck and driven to Klooga.
When they reached the camp they saw that all of the camp’s three thousand prisoners had been gathered in the barbed-wire-enclosed yard behind one of the barracks. The truckload including 339 was put in a group consisting entirely of men brought from Lagedi. No. 339 asked a guard what was going on. The guard said they were being taken to Riga and to Germany. So they were “going to Riga” at last. A few minutes after his truckload arrived, 339 saw, off in the underbrush some distance away, a line of about three hundred men carrying logs. He asked one of his friends who had arrived from Lagedi with the earlier trucks the night before what the logs were being carried for. The friend said he did not know, that early that morning the Germans had picked out the three hundred strongest men in the camp, had given them a huge breakfast, and had taken them out to work.
The breakdown and late arrival of his truck kept 339 out of that working party. That is how the instinct that had made him get in the last truck saved his life, for not one of the strong men carrying wood survived that day.
No. 339 asked the guard where the men were carrying the wood, and why. The guard said that the wood was needed in Germany. It was going along with the prisoners to Riga and Germany. The prisoners, he said, were loading the wood for Riga.
The prisoners were loading the wood for Riga only in the symbolical sense of the word. They were taking it to a clearing in the woods about half a mile from the rear gate of the camp. There they were ordered to construct curious platforms. First they laid four heavy logs in a square. Then they filled in the square with pine boughs. Then they scattered small kindling wood among the pine boughs. Next they put long crosspieces across the square, and across these they laid shorter logs until there was a kind of floor. In the center they put up four poles to form an area about a foot square and kept the space inside that little area free of sticks and boughs. The platforms, of which there were four, were about thirty feet square.
This work took quite a while. In the enclosure, 339 grew suspicious. At noon promptly the methodical Germans fed the prisoners in the enclosure. But the others did not come back for lunch. No. 339 asked the guard what was holding them up. The guard said, “Perhaps they have decided to take them straight to Riga without coming back here.”
The men at the platforms must have been terrified at what was happening then. They were being divided into groups of thirty. The first three groups were ordered onto three of the platforms and were told to lie prone. When they were all down, SS men with revolvers stepped onto the platforms and shot those who were lying there, one by one, in the back of the head. Those who tried to run away or tried to resist were shot in the face or stomach.
As soon as all the men on the platforms were shot and before some of them were dead, the others were ordered to build another layer to the platform right on top of the bodies of their companions. Still no boughs or sticks were put in the little square in the center. The Germans had thought of everything: that was to serve as a chimney, to give the fire some draft.
As soon as he heard the first shot in the enclosure, 339 knew that the Germans were determined to kill every Jew, Russian, and Estonian in the camp. He was terrified, but he tried to think clearly. One thing he knew: this would be his last chance to try an escape.
While the men out at the platforms were building the second layer, 339 began to plan. There were just two permanent guards in the enclosure. Others came and went. The two in the enclosure had tommy guns and walked back and forth in front of the two large groups. The guard in front of the women looked across at the smaller Lagedi group really carefully only when he was walking toward it. It took him about twenty seconds to make each lap. The nearest door of the U-shaped barrack was about sixty feet away. It would take perhaps ten seconds to run to the door and disappear to the left up the stairs.
Fortunately he had explored every inch of the barrack many times. He would run upstairs all the way to the double ceiling of the attic. He would go completely around the three sides of the U above the ceiling. At the other end of the building, he would drop down to the top tier of bunks, run around a pile of window frames lying up there, pull them into a crude barricade, crawl through in the dark to the hollow chute down to the next floor. This was large enough for one person to hide in, but it was dark. Beyond that, 339 could not imagine anything.
Out at the platforms the second layer was ready, and three more groups were ordered to climb up. The SS men followed and began putting their pistols to the backs of victims’ skulls.
When the noise of the second group of shots was heard in the enclosure, panic broke out. Women began shrieking. There was a commotion among the men. No. 339’s friends looked at him to see what he would do. In the excitement over the shooting, he ran.
He made the door all right. As he ran up the stairs he heard the sounds of footsteps behind him, and he tried to run faster. Then he realized that there were many footsteps, and that he was afraid of being followed by only one guard, or at most two. He looked back. Something he had not foreseen had happened. Many other prisoners were following his lead.
Quite correctly the guards out in the yard held their positions with their tommy guns aimed at the bulk of the crowd. But before they could get it under control well over a hundred people had run into both doors of the building. More than forty followed 339 over the course he had planned. By the time they all got behind the barricade of window frames and in and near the chute, the place was a mass of terrified flesh.
All those who had run into the other door of the barracks, on the ground floor three flights down from 339 and his followers, tried to hide on that first floor. They threw themselves under bunks, cringed in corners, and climbed onto upper bunks.
The guards called out for reinforcements. These entered the door on the ground floor under 339’s hiding place. One of 339’s companions had cut an electric-light wire and caused a short circuit, so the barracks were all dark. Apparently the SS reinforcements were conscious of death themselves that afternoon, because 339 heard two German voices say, in tones that seemed to express fear of the dark, “Are there any guards in there? Come out, you people.”
There was a silence. A friend of 339 named Dondes Faiwusz, who had run through the kitchen shed inside the U of the barracks and into a window on the ground floor, saw what happened next. Two SS men entered the main room on the ground floor, where all the runaways were trying so pathetically to hide in exposed places, and they sprayed the room, one to each side, with tommy-gun bullets. Up on the third floor the forty men heard a great deal of firing—enough, they later learned, to have killed eighty-seven of their fellow prisoners. It was hard for 339 and his packed-in companions to restrain themselves from crying out in their panicky conviction that the Germans would come up and find them and spray them with bullets, too.
But after the firing downstairs, and the screaming and groaning that followed it, subsided, 339 and his friends could hear only distant sounds—shouts in the courtyard, more shooting far away.
The shooting came in periodic flurries—as new layers were finished on the platforms. In midafternoon there was an increase in the firing. Apparently the SS men thought they would never get finished, using only the platforms, so they herded seven hundred people into a barracks, shot them there one by one, and set the building afire. No. 339 and his fellows were lucky that the Germans did not choose their barracks. The smell of burning wood and flesh raised their hair on end. They thought their building might be burned.
The shooting and the smell of burning went on until two or three in the morning. Then there were sounds of German voices and trucks and cars driving off. Then there was silence.
No. 339 and the others could not be sure that all the Germans had gone. Nor could they be sure that they would not come back the next morning and hunt them out. The stench of burning flesh and the sound of screaming people were so fresh in their minds that they crouched absolutely still all night without whispering.
The group of forty stayed in their dark hole for five days and nights. On the second night some of them sneaked out, as they often had, and stole bread from the camp commissary. But they did not dare look around much. They went back up to the attic.
On the fifth day one of the men ventured out. The camp was deserted. He saw a Russian airplane overhead. He ran trembling upstairs to tell the others of their deliverance. A few hours later the first Russian soldier came into the camp.
No. 339 thought first about the new life he could now begin. He took a scrap of paper and he wrote a letter he intended to give to a Russian officer:
To the Consul of the American States in Moskau.
Dear Consul!
I stayed from thousands. I have lost my parents and brothers. My wife remained in Wilno and I have no news from her. The only one who remained is my father-in-law, an American citizen who is now living in New York and [with] whom I want to communicate about myself. I had no other chance and I am forced to ask you and I am sure that you will not refuse me. Please send this telegram: Samuel Amdurski, Federal Food Corporation, New York. During a year no news from Liba and Bertha. I am in Estonia. I will do all to find them out.
Benjamin
Then 339 thought about the life he had had. He sat down, pried the heel off his boot, and found his wedding ring there. He tried to put it on his fourth finger. Three years of manual labor for the master race had thickened the fingers that had once played Beethoven and measured chemicals into test tubes. He could not get it on. He put it on his little finger. It just fit.