After what we had been through in the previous weeks, the experience of simply sitting in a moving train was an almost overwhelming novelty. Even though the cattle cars were stuffed with prisoners and locked from the outside, we were suspended in a kind of euphoria. It had required the strongest nerves and physical stamina to survive in that open camp at Balti, without even the most primitive human requirements, watching as every day hundreds more died. With each passing day it had seemed more and more likely that the Russians had decided this was the simplest way of eliminating us. No one believed any longer that our situation could or would change.
But now to be in a train, one that was actually moving, reawakened a hope that there might still be a chance for our survival after all. A moving train had to have a destination, however far that might be. Even if we were heading for Siberia, it would still be better than turning up our toes in an open field in the cold rain.
We sat close together on the dry plank floor of the cattle car. Some of us stood up to stretch for a while. Conversations began, and we started introducing ourselves to those seated nearby. Somehow we made room for the seriously ill so that they could lie a little more comfortably.
A piece of tin was nailed below one of the two sliding doors in such a way that it could be used as a primitive toilet, draining outside the car. For a few hours all went fairly well, and then it began to get dark.
When night finally fell, each man, overcome by exhaustion and weakness, started trying to stretch out. But there simply wasn’t enough room. Sooner or later we toppled over and fell asleep wherever we were. Within a relatively brief time, bodies were layered on top of each other. Since no one wanted to be on the bottom, smothered by crisscrossing stinking bodies, we began rolling and tossing, and this activity didn’t stop until dawn, when the first rays of light poked through the cracks between the boards in the walls and a few men began to rouse themselves.
At one of the many halts, the guards opened the doors and handed out loaves of bread, one loaf to twenty men. The already familiar distribution took place under the watchful eyes of the recipients. Nobody wanted to receive even a crumb less than his due. The same twenty men shared a bucket of water and a small bag of coarse salt.
We spent the third day stopped on the outskirts of a station and could hear the rain pelting the wooden roof. The next day the train was still standing in the same spot, but the sun was shining. The sky must have been cloudless, and it began to get hotter and hotter inside the cars. Each was crammed full with fifty men, and the ventilation was minimal. By noon we were all bathed in perspiration and having trouble breathing. We began to drum on the walls, and when this produced no reaction from the guards, we banged even louder. A rhythm began to build, and I suddenly heard wood splintering.
A burst from a submachine gun brought our protest to an abrupt halt. Voices of Russian soldiers rang out, and then, with a loud clatter, the sliding doors on one side of the train were opened. A battalion of soldiers was lined up parallel to the train, pointing weapons in our direction.
This is the end, I thought, expecting a salvo from the guns any second.
A loudly bellowing Russian officer appeared, and an interpreter called out the translation, “The doors will be shoved back again, but left open a handsbreadth. If anyone tries to open them wider or makes any noise at all, the soldiers have orders to shoot three men from each car!”
He had barely finished speaking when something completely unexpected occurred. The train made a sudden jerk, and all who were standing fell to the floor. After a second, lighter jolt, the train began to move. Away we chugged with wide-open doors, past the astonished soldiers with their guns still leveled, past the openmouthed officer who didn’t seem to know how he should react.
Thanks to this lack of coordination between the officer and the locomotive engineers, we sat for an entire afternoon dangling our legs out the open doors and admiring the passing scene. Five more days transpired before our arrival in Kiev, during which time a few in my car died. We kept this fact from the guards so that our bread ration wouldn’t be cut. During the night we squeezed the bodies through a narrow window below the roof.
We didn’t get to see much of Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine. After leaving the train we dragged ourselves for two hours along the outskirts of the city until we reached an abandoned brick factory that was being used as a quarantine camp for prisoners.
Although many more died there during the following two weeks, it seemed like a paradise to those of us who survived. We had a roof over our heads, dry straw for a bed, and regular meals.
On the twelfth of November 1944, I left the quarantine camp in a column of six hundred. We marched all morning until we reached the bunker camp, which by now had been described to us many times.
This enormous camp was capable of sheltering several thousand prisoners of war. Except for some smaller administration buildings, the compound consisted primarily of numerous parallel, half-underground bunkers, with roofs of dirt hills overgrown with grass.
Inside each bunker stood two long rows of double-deck wooden bunks, separated down the middle by tables and benches nailed together from rough planks. A couple of heavily smoking petroleum lamps provided the only evening light.
Each of us received two threadbare military blankets and a bag stuffed with lumpy cotton for a pillow. As I lay down on the straw sack to which I had been assigned, I thought I was in heaven.
At 2:00 p.m. a camp policeman came into the bunker and yelled out in German, heavily accented with Polish, “Everybody fall in. On the double!”
We ran out to the large open area in front of the bunkers.
“Line up in columns of a hundred men each, four to a row, but fast!”
We stood shivering in our bare feet on muddy ground while we waited for the officers to appear.
“At ease. Dress ranks.”
A small group of Russian officers strolled out of the building across from where we stood.
“Count off,” yelled the camp policeman.
The man at the front right-hand corner of each column called out one, and we quickly continued through the rows until the last.
“Five hundred eighty men reporting for roll call,” announced the policeman.
Thirty soldiers with submachine guns came marching up and positioned themselves just behind us. I waited, with sinking heart, to see what this new development could mean. The next command rang out.
“Remove all articles of clothing above the waist and raise your arms.”
The soldiers went through the rows, inspecting our upper arms. When they were finished, they had ordered about twenty-five of the prisoners to step out of line. These were members of the Waffen-SS, troops who all had their blood types tattooed on their upper arms so that they could be given speedy transfusions on the battlefield. It had been one of their many special privileges. The twenty-five were executed that same day at dusk.
One of the well-dressed Russian officers said to the rest of us, in quite good German, “You will be taken next in small groups to the sauna, where you will receive clean clothing. Tomorrow we will begin taking down your personal data, and after that you will be assigned to various work groups.
“As long as you are here in camp, you will receive three warm meals a day, five hundred grams of bread, and coffee. You will give absolute obedience to every officer and camp guard. Any lack of discipline will be immediately and severely punished. Dismissed!”
When we were enrolled the following day, I stated my Austrian nationality, my training in mechanical drawing, and the fact of my Jewish blood. I was surprised to see so many non-Germans in the camp. The prisoner ranks included Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians, Poles, and even a Dutchman. One way or another, they all had fought for Germany, whether voluntarily or under coercion.
Although I had heavy diarrhea and was generally very run-down, I began to regain hope regarding my chances for survival. Everything seemed to be falling into an organized pattern. I was thankful for the roof over my head, for the warm soup, and for the chance to keep clean once again.
The biweekly bath in the sauna was one of our most welcome routines, though it also included certain drawbacks. During the all-too-brief minutes that we were allotted for washing off two weeks of grime, our uniforms were heated to just under burning temperature in order to kill any lice. The clothing was often returned to us in a slightly scorched condition, and once in a while it was so badly burned that we had to wait naked for hours until replacements could be obtained.
After leaving the sauna, we entered a small room where the barbers were at work. Using a white liquid of unknown composition as a soap substitute, they shaved off all the hair on our heads and bodies.
I recall, in particular, the shaving of our pubic hair. The barber worked roughly and with great enthusiasm. This procedure was always fairly painful, but it was carried out in order to prevent an outbreak of yellow fever, an epidemic spread by lice nesting in the hair.
All of the camp police were German prisoners of war from the Polish-German border areas. Of course they all claimed Polish allegiance at this point. Because of their ability to understand Russian, a Slavic language similar to their own, and to speak it to some degree, they were relegated to the administrative jobs. That included the kitchen, food transport, and in-camp police. They also took over the role of officers in the work details and inside the bunkers.
As Poles, many of them had built up a certain amount of hatred for the Germans as the losers and gave vent to these feelings through general brutality. No Russian ever mishandled me, but once, when my diarrhea forced me to relieve myself in a place not designated as an official latrine, two of the Polish camp police kicked out two of my front teeth with their boots.
About mid-November a soldier came into our bunker and called out my name. When I stood up, he said, “You are expected in Captain Pushkin’s office.”
We walked to one of the administration buildings, where the officer in question awaited me with a friendly expression and offered me a chair. Captain Pushkin was about fifty years old, with a round Slavic face and gray hair starting to thin.
He said, in fluent German, “Prisoners here in camp who have worked in important German war industries have been called upon to provide as much exact information as possible about the factories: their locations, number of buildings, type of production, etc. The sketches they give us are usually poor and hastily drawn. With your background you should be able to work those rough sketches into more professional-looking drawings. As for all special tasks here in camp, you will receive double rations.”
I began that same day. After I had completed my drawings, another prisoner in the office translated the German descriptions into Russian. The work was easy, the atmosphere in the office relaxed and pleasant. Captain Pushkin often brought potatoes from home that we sliced and fried over the little iron stove.
Two weeks later I arrived one day at work with bad stomach pains and feeling generally ill. The captain laid his hand on my forehead and said, “Come with me. I’m taking you to the infirmary.”
At the rickety barracks that served as a hospital, the captain talked for a while with the Russian head doctor. Before he left he said, “I hope you will be well again soon. I’ll visit you tomorrow and bring you something to read.”
He left me with the feeling that it was important to him for me to recover. In the brief time we had spent together we had discovered many interests in common. His wife was a Viennese Jew, and he had visited Austria a few times before the war. We often talked about music and the museums in Vienna, as well as many other topics that had nothing to do with the war.
Pushkin was not a tall man, only about five feet five inches, but he made up in breadth what he lacked in height. His enormous chest was made to seem even larger by the overlarge epaulets worn by the Russian officers. His thick lips and small eyes, hidden behind round glasses, made him look very unmilitary. The general impression was much more that of a professor than of a career soldier.
Once he had brought a large cardboard folder filled with numerous etchings on yellowed paper. He spent some time studying each one painstakingly with a large magnifying glass.
During a pause I asked, “May I take a look at the prints?”
Pushkin nodded, saying, “Yes, but be careful. Some of them are very old.”
I considered this a special privilege and enjoyed the wonderful feeling of being able to hold the delicate sheets in my roughened hands. Etchings and engravings had fascinated me ever since we had been taken as teenagers to the Albertina, the Viennese museum with the largest and richest collection of graphics in the world. I mentioned the museum to Captain Pushkin, and he answered rather dreamily, “Yes, I also spent many hours there.”
After Pushkin left the hospital, an orderly led me past a few rooms overflowing with beds and patients to a small room containing only eight beds. Next door was a room where the German prison doctors made their examinations and also slept. After they had examined me, I heard the diagnosis that I had already suspected—dysentery.
It had finally caught up with me, after all. I had no idea whether my chance of survival was any better here in the infirmary than at Balti, where so many had died. My body wasn’t in the best condition for withstanding a serious illness. I hadn’t the slightest bit of fat under my skin, and my bones jutted out sharply all over. In any event, I didn’t intend to give up easily, now that I was finally in an organized camp with no more shooting, where my only obligation was to survive until the time came to send me home!
The orderly took me back to the small room. The beds had iron frames. On these, three boards bent or sagging in different degrees and directions supported a thin and lumpy cotton mattress. The German orderly tried to find three boards curved more or less to the same degree for my bed. Then, to the general astonishment of the other patients, he laid two mattresses on top and gave me two relatively serviceable blankets. All the others lay two to a bed and shared one blanket. It must help to know a captain, I thought.
The other patients didn’t speak to me, and the atmosphere was tense and strange. I felt so terrible that I really didn’t care. I was dozing in my almost comfortable bed, when suddenly a man in a white apron appeared beside me. It was the cook from the camp kitchen. He looked down at me and asked, “What do you want to eat?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I said. “Is it some kind of bad joke, or what?”
“I have orders to bring to you anything that is in the kitchen, at any time of day, in any amount, prepared any way you wish.”
That hit like a bomb. I glanced helplessly around the room, taking in all the amazed expressions. After a few seconds I recovered and said quietly, “Oatmeal with milk would be wonderful.”
The cook didn’t seem particularly happy about my exceptional position. He left abruptly, and half an hour later a different aproned person brought what I had requested. I ate it with a guilty conscience. The mood in the little room was very heavy and still. Then I fell asleep.
When I woke up I thought at first I must have dreamed it all. But there, next to me, stood the empty porridge bowl. Was this unusual treatment only because I had worked for two weeks for Captain Pushkin? I recalled our many conversations in his office.
Once he had asked me, “Why, with your Jewish blood, did you become a soldier in the German army?”
“I couldn’t find any way out, any way of not becoming a soldier,” I had replied. “A city boy, nineteen years old, with no money, where could I have gone?”
“Why didn’t you come over to our side?”
“We were told that you took no prisoners, that all who surrendered would be shot.”
“But you are now a prisoner, and we didn’t shoot you.”
“I didn’t know that then.”
Another time we had almost gotten into an argument because we disagreed about which museum contained a particular painting by Brueghel.
Perhaps he simply valued me as a person, regardless of my age, nationality, or status as the enemy, and that’s why he was bringing his influence as a Russian officer to bear on my situation.
It had only cost him a few words, the three minutes he had spoken with the head doctor. I let it go at that and decided not to think about it anymore. An old Jewish saying came to mind: “If you are offered something, then take it. If something is taken from you, then yell!”
The days passed, and my condition remained the same, with fever, pain, and dark blood in my stool. I could barely get down a spoonful of what I ordered to eat, so the doctor prescribed a large daily injection of glucose and vitamin pills. All of these special medications originated in the United States of America, as well as a hypodermic syringe with cracked glass. It had only one needle, which had to be boiled over and over again.
I became accustomed to my preferential treatment, and the other patients cautiously began including me in their conversations. They ate their cabbage soup, millet gruel, and gluey black bread while I continued to receive my light and special diet, the only one in the entire camp to the best of my knowledge.
When I began to feel somewhat better, I ordered considerably more than I was able to eat myself and shared it with the others in the room. They thought I was a distant relation of the captain’s Austrian wife, and I neither corrected nor confirmed that impression. On the twenty-fourth of December, the orderlies brought in a little pine tree and set it up near the door leading to the doctors’ room. They decorated it with pieces of colored paper and attached a few of the empty glass glucose ampoules. These, filled with sunflower oil and lit, took the place of the traditional candles.
When evening fell the candles were lit, and a group of prisoners strolled from room to room singing German Christmas carols. I felt my throat tighten, pulled my blankets over my head, and sobbed into my pillow. Would I ever be able to spend another Christmas at home?
Why was Christmas such a special day for me? No one in my family went to church or to a synagogue. Not even my grandmother had been a practicing Jew, as far as I knew. We observed neither the Christian nor the Jewish holidays. But in spite of that, the twenty-fourth of December had been the day that we all looked forward to from earliest childhood.
Was it because of the presents? Or was it all the mysterious goings-on until, at dusk, our parents finally led us into the parlor that had been locked all day long and we stood, wide-eyed, singing “Silent Night” in front of the enormous fir tree blazing with two hundred real candles? It was certainly the day when families got together if at all possible, a family celebration.
Even though my mother did not attend any church, she wasn’t an unbeliever. She believed in something that she could define only for herself, for which there existed no dogma, no rituals in church or synagogue. She studied many theological books and was fascinated by the great physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck who, with their findings, seemed to come so close to the connection between science and religion.
Now, in my wobbly bed in Russia, I would have given a great deal to have one of those books that she had always recommended to me but I had never read. I had preferred going out to paint another tree or invent a still more complicated alarm system. I thought all this over while the voices of the carolers became fainter as they moved on to more distant rooms.
A few days after Christmas I was provided with rather different reading material when Captain Pushkin brought me some books by Lenin, Marx, and Engels, as well as a few issues of the German newspaper printed in Russia, Freies Deutschland.
“How are you feeling now?” he asked. “You look as though the worst is already behind you.”
“I still feel very weak,” I answered, “but I am much better. The fever and the pains are both gone.”
“Do you feel strong enough to come to my office tomorrow?”
“I’ll try.”
“Good,” he said. “I’ll send a soldier over for you tomorrow morning at ten.”
The soldier arrived punctually the next day and accompanied me to where the captain and two other high-ranking officers were waiting. One of them told me to sit down, and he began reading from a piece of paper while Captain Pushkin translated for me.
“Your name is Georg Rauch? You are an Austrian of Jewish descent and twenty years old?”
“Jawohl, Herr Oberst.”
“During your basic training you worked for a few months at the automobile factory in Chemnitz?”
“Jawohl, Herr Oberst.”
“According to the information I have received concerning you, I believe that you are qualified to work for Russia, to help us end the war as soon as possible. This is an offer, and you have two days to think it over. If you decide to accept, we shall see to it that you become well again as soon as possible and then we will send you home.
“We will inform you at a later date what you can do for us when you are back in Vienna. Primarily it will concern certain information that we need in order to coordinate our activities. We will expect your answer the day after tomorrow, at the same hour. That is all for today.”
Captain Pushkin smiled at me kindly, and I returned to my bed to do some heavy thinking. Spies are people who betray their fatherland, who are eventually caught and shot. That much I knew from German books and movies. I had never thought much about it, but my intuition told me that everything to do with espionage was nasty, dangerous, deceitful, and generally unpleasant! What’s more, I had the impression that once one had become mixed up in such things, it was impossible ever to get out again.
Suddenly it became all too clear to me why I had received such very special treatment. My services were required. The only thing I couldn’t understand was why me in particular, the only one in thousands? But was I the only one? At any rate, I didn’t know any others who received diet on demand or glucose injections. I was flattered, but very uncertain whether I really wanted this honor.
By now I had been able to observe that most of the sick men in the hospital didn’t ever recover. Most of them died after a few weeks, especially those who developed bloody stools or spit up blood when they coughed.
I didn’t have to be a doctor to see that most of the patients simply starved to death. They could no more digest the sticky, sour black bread than they could the coarse cabbage soup. They got nutritional edema, water in the legs, which slowly ascended higher in their bodies until it finally filled their chests and squeezed their hearts. I could hear them rattling in the night.
Extra medicine didn’t seem available for anyone else, either. Not that I thought they would let me die on purpose, but after all, Russia had a war to win and needed medicine for her own people, especially if they had so little that they had to get the most basic medicines, and even vitamin pills, from the United States.
There had obviously been plans to recruit me as a spy for some time. Captain Pushkin was the one who had provided higher officials with the details. From the moment I was delivered to the hospital, I had been allotted special treatment—the double mattresses and blankets, the special diet, medicines, the books and newspapers.
What if I refused the offer? All of the special treatment surely would be discontinued immediately, and in a few weeks I would kick the bucket, just like all the rest. But what if I said yes? The newspapers I was reading were full of the continuing Russian victories and the successful advances of the Allied invasion. How much longer could the war go on? How long would it be until the Germans were crushed in their own country by the hard-pressing superior forces?
By the time I could be brought back to health, had completed something like basic spy training, and had been smuggled behind the German lines, surely it would all be over anyway. And I would be alive. To say no obviously meant to be dead. What’s more, I didn’t want the Germans to win the war anyway.
I thought of the Jews in the attic and of what my mother would say when her son returned as a spy. That is, if she were still alive after all those devastating bomb attacks. I remembered again the banner slogan, “Might comes before Right,” that had made my mother so angry. What was right must always come before anything else, she had said. In this sense it wasn’t even a disgrace to help out as a spy in order to bring an end to the National Socialistic system as soon as possible.
Two days later, on December 30, I told the secret service officer that I had decided to accept the offer.
“Karascho,” he replied, as though he had never expected that I would decide otherwise. Then he continued, “For the time being you will remain lying in the same room, and your first mission, if you want to interpret it that way, will be to find out which of the other patients in your room were members of the Nazi Party. Your cover will be ‘Flussman.’ In a little while—let’s say two weeks—when someone comes up and addresses you by that name, you will tell him what you have discovered. Nothing in writing, please. You may go now.”