I must now backtrack on my account of my parents’ fate in Warsaw and relate their involvement in the mass deportation of Jews from that city (as from all Polish ghettoes) to the death camps.
In the summer of 1942, the first orders were passed down from the SS commandant Hoefle to the Judenrat. Six thousand Jews a day were to be supplied for the transports to the east.
My father, Uncle Moses, and Dr. Kohn were among the officials notified of this action.
“But what do we tell these people?” asked my father.
“The truth,” Hoefle said. “They are going to a family camp in Russia. A work camp. Fresh air. Better food. Parents and children will be kept together. It is better than staying in this pesthole that you have let Warsaw become.”
My Uncle Moses said, “People may resist.”
Hoefle snickered. “You people haven’t resisted yet. You don’t know what it is to fight. And you realize, since the murder of Heydrich we can’t be as generous and gentle as we have been.”
My father did some calculating. “But at the rate of six thousand people a day, the ghetto will be emptied.”
“Nonsense,” Hoefle said. “We want to drain off the excess, make life easier for all of you.”
“How will selections be made?” asked Dr. Kohn.
“That’s your worry, not mine. But I want six thousand, and there will be an accurate head count, a list of every single name. If people fail to show up, they’ll be grabbed off the streets at random.” He smiled. “We might even start with a few of you.”
And so the trains began to leave Warsaw. It was amazing how quickly the ghetto began to empty. In a month’s time. 180,000 people had been sent “east.” But life was no easier. The Germans had stopped all trade with the outside; food was scarcer, deaths from disease and starvation increased.
One night in September, Uncle Moses waited in the railyards, hiding in a tool shed.
A train returning from the “East” clanked in, stopped. Zalman, the union leader, rolled from under a freight car, sneaked along the siding, and found Moses.
“Well?” Moses asked.
Zalman took a moment to catch his breath. “Those trains are not going to Russia.” “Where, then?”
“Place called Treblinka. It’s three hours away. I checked the numbers on the wagons. Same trains that left yesterday are back today.”
“Treblinka? A work camp?”
Zalman shook his head. “A death factory. Polish Christians are sent to a work camp. The Jews go to this big building. The SS tell them it’s for delousing.”
“God in Heaven. What we suspected.”
“Fake signs everywhere, as if they were going to register the Jews for work after the delousing—hatmakers, tanners, ironworkers. They tell them, when you get your bath you’ll get your job assignment. But they never come out. They go in, and they are gassed.”
“You … saw this …”
Zalman nodded. “Got it from a kapo. He didn’t know who I was. Undress them, keep them waiting, herd them in. Women and children, old people, all of them. All of the Warsaw ghetto will end up there.”
Moses took his arm. “You and Anelevitz and Eva, you were right all along. You knew. You understood.”
Zalman tugged at his cap. “Come on. We have to tell the resistance.”
Some time later in Anelevitz’ headquarters on Lesano Street, they discussed Zalman’s report. Few of them in the Jewish Fighting Organization—Kovel, Zalman, Eva, Lowy, all the young people—had ever believed the Nazis’ lies. But the bulk of the ghetto dwellers, with an infinite capacity for self-deception, the ever-present hope that “things would get better,” yet put their faith in “family camps” and “resettlement.”
They listened hopefully to the BBC shortwave broadcasts, for some hint that the world knew of their fate and would make it public.
The announcer talked about gains in North Africa on the Libyan front, and of 140 sorties flown by Allied planes over the channel.
“Word from Polish resistance forces states that the Nazis are engaging in atrocities against Polish civilians, singling out priests, teachers and anyone who might form a Polish leadership,” the BBC announcer said. “Shooting of Polish civilians is an everyday occurrence, for minor infractions.”
It was true, of course. But not a word had been uttered about the fate of the Jews in Poland.
“They’ve known about Treblinka for weeks,” Uncle Moses said. “And not a word from them. They’ve been liquidating the Warsaw ghetto since July—and nothing. What is wrong with the BBC?”
“Now you know why we are Zionists,” Anelevitz said. “We do it for ourselves, for no one else will.”
“Maybe they can’t believe the reports,” my father said.
Eva added, “Or refuse to believe them.”
“We got word out through the Swedes,” Zalman said. “The Jews of Poland are being systematically destroyed. ‘Broadcast it!’ we begged. You know their response. ‘Not all of your radiograms lend themselves to publication.’ What the hell does that mean?”
Anelevitz turned off the radio. “It means they choose not to believe. Or they think we are lying. The crime is so enormous, they won’t believe it. That’s what the Germans are counting on.”
Kovel nodded. “There’s only one answer. More guns. The ghetto is being reduced every day. If only a few hundred of us fight, it will mean something.”
It was decided that my Uncle Moses and the boy Aaron would make another trip, several if necessary, outside the wall, to try to get help from the Polish resistance.
My father—my mother also was present at this meeting, Eva recalls—-then got the idea of setting up a clinic at the rail station, the so-called Umschlagplatz. He would attempt to take people off the transports, younger, stronger people who might be useful to the resistance, who would join the fight.
“It may help,” Zalman said gloomily. “But the only response is guns.”
Someone called. A roundup was taking place.
Several of the resistance fighters went to an upper room, and from the cracks in a boarded-up window they watched SS guards marching off the people destined for Treblinka. At one point two young men broke away; one actually fought with the SS guard before he was shot dead. The other was dragged out of a building and also shot.
“At least they are not going so willingly,” Anelevitz said.
“But why don’t they all fight?” Zalman asked. “There are hundreds of thousands of us, a handful of guards. We will die anyway.”
My mother put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, Josef. The boy with the briefcase. He is one of my students. He is thirteen years old.”
“You don’t have to look, Berta,” my father said.
“Why not?” asked Kovel—not cruelly.
And so they were marched out to their doom—six thousand Jews a day from the Warsaw ghetto, to the death camps. Only now and then did they resist—sporadic, wild acts of defiance. For the most part, they left quietly, telling themselves that they were going to a “better place.”
My father’s attempt to set up a clinic near the rail station, and rescue a handful of Jews from the gas chambers, can be looked on in retrospect as a foolhardy, trivial attempt to counteract the enormous crime.
My wife Tamar, a realist, a true sabra, tends to scoff at my accounts of it. “Nothing important,” she says. “The world has had enough symbolic gestures from Jews. Mass action is all that matters. Power. Strength. Policies.”
In any case, during the deportations to Treblinka, one summer morning, a vacant store near the rail station reopened. The windows were draped with clean white cloth. A Red Mogen David hung over the door, on which was written “Railroad Branch, Ghetto Hospital.”
Max Lowy and his wife were among the first people saved by my father.
Lowy was important to the resistance—he was a skilled printer, crucial to the underground press. When my father saw him sitting disconsolately on his baggage, awaiting, with a mass of other Jews, the train to the “east,” he went into action.
In his white coat, stethoscope around his neck, clipboard in hand, my father approached the Lowys.
“Hey, doc, what are you doing?” the printer asked.
“Stick your tongue out,” Papa said. “Let me feel your pulse. You’re too ill to travel. Your wife too. Get into the clinic.”
“What? The SS will notice.”
“Never mind. You know what will happen to you if you get on that train. Go on, it’s all right.”
“But …”
“Act sick. Hold your head. You’re incubating typhus.”
Lowy caught on. “You don’t have to tell me twice. Come on, Chana.”
In that manner, my father rescued a family of three, some strong young men—potential soldiers in the fighting organization—and a few others.
As he was herding the last of the people into the clinic, a kapo named Honigstein followed him. Inside, my mother, in a nurse’s uniform, was making people lie on cots, thrusting thermometers into their mouths. Uncle Moses was running a modest dispensary.
The kapo entered a few paces behind Papa.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked.
My father ignored him. “Aspirin for those two,” he said. “That man in the corner may have cholera. He must be isolated.”
“What is this?” Honigstein asked.
My father did not even look up. “Rail-station clinic. To make sure the transports aren’t infected.”
“If this shipment is short, you’re in trouble, Dr. Weiss. And me too.”
“This has been fully authorized. Get out of my clinic. We have orders not to let people who might spread contagion get on the trains.”
The kapo left, but my mother, standing at the window, saw that he was talking to an SS man. “Oh, dear God … he’s telling him,” she said.
“Papa said, “Lowy. You and your wife leave by the rear door.”
Moses passed out aspirin and water to the other family. The two young men remained on cots, simulating illness.
The kapo returned with the SS man.
“He says it’s a special clinic,” the kapo said.
The SS man was a dull-eyed clod, and he seemed fooled. He looked at the people on the cots, my mother in white uniform, Moses moving about like an orderly.
“This woman has typhus, and her children may have it also,” Papa said. “I have orders not to allow infected persons on the trains.”
He made it sound logical. The SS man scratched his face, waited. All knew that if the ruse was discovered, my parents and Moses would be the next to leave for Treblinka.
“Nurse,” my father said. “Cover that woman. And the children may have to go to the hospital.” He turned to Moses. “Can we get some disinfectant soap?”
“I’ll try.”
The charade seemed to work. Outside, the loudspeaker was ordering the Jews to begin boarding the trains. People were being told to stay together, so that they could be assigned living quarters at the “family camps.”
The SS man and the kapo, anxious to push the loading along, departed. Everyone was relieved for a moment.
My parents and Uncle Moses watched the Jews of Warsaw climbing aboard the trains to their death.
“And so they leave,” Papa said. “Six thousand today, six thousand tomorrow.”
“Josef,” Moses asked. “Does it mean anything … the five or six we spare?”
“I have to think so,” my father said.
Auschwitz
May 1943
In a sense I am being punished.
My failure to crack the artist-conspirators at Theresienstadt has not helped my reputation with Kaltenbrunner. He was furious at the way the Jewish artists defied us. But he has bigger problems at the moment—the annihilation of the Jews, a pressing matter indeed, now that the Russians are on the offensive.
Erratic, paranoid, he in no way fills Heydrich’s boots, yet he has taken over all his posts—the Security Office, the Gestapo, and the RSHA, which is largely concerned with the Jewish problem.
Kaltenbrunner senses my fear of him. He has assigned me to the death centers, as a kind of roving reporter, to brief him on the progress of Maidanek, Sobibor, Belzec, and most of all Auschwitz, which is becoming the heart of our efforts.
Hoess, the commandant, proved a thoughtful host for me, and for a certain Professor Pfannenstiel, an expert on hygiene from the University of Marburg. The commandant explained that not only is each of the several camps at Auschwitz surrounded by barbed wire, but that each block within the camp, an area holding about four thousand inmates, is surrounded on all sides by barbed wire. The exterior barbed wire is a double fence, strung on concrete, the space between patrolled by dogs and armed guards.
“Himmler is afraid of an Allied air attack,” Hoess told us. “He fears some of them may escape.”
I questioned him about some reports of deliberate sadism on the parts of guards. (Unfortunately, our lower ranks do not always attract the finest kind of German soldier.) Hoess conceded that the famous Sergeant Moll, whose job it is to dump the Zyklon B crystals into the chamber, once took “target practice” against a party of Jewish women. The women were naked, quite beautiful, it was reported, and not all died immediately of their wounds. He was reprimanded.
A woman guard named Irma Grese, obviously a deviate of some kind, is said to have cut open the breasts of Jewish women with her whip. These women were then operated on without anesthesia by a physician, while Miss Grese watched. Hoess claimed he would look into it, but such activities, he explained, were known as “making sport.”
As for medical experiments, Hoess shrugged. This was not his department. He had orders from above, he claimed, to let them proceed. My old friend (and nemesis) Artur Nebe has supplied gypsies for sea-water experiments, in which they were forced to drink salt water, and died in excruciating pain.
I knew about the selecting process, and did not care to see it. The Jews arrive from all over Europe, in filth-strewn, crammed cars. A triage is made at the rail siding. Those fit to work are sent to the barracks; the aged, infirm, children, mothers with young and any potential troublemakers are marched at once to one of Hoess’ four installations.
On this lovely May morning, I stood with Pfannenstiel on the roof of one of the chambers. To one side, in a parklike setting, an orchestra of women prisoners in blue uniforms played airs from Die Fledermaus.
A lawn and hedges have been cultivated on the roof of the building. Some distance away are the famous plantings of trees I had been told about, where the Jews are made to stand while awaiting their turn.
Hoess and Pfannenstiel indulged in some technical discussion of disposal problems. They discussed the furnaces connected with the larger and newer crematoria, where bodies are burned immediately, as opposed to the outdoor system at the older units, where bodies have to be dragged out by the Sonderkommandos—special squads composed of Jewish prisoners who eventually are gassed themselves—and burned in the open.
“Human fat is a remarkable fuel,” Hoess was saying. “We use dippers to draw it off and start new fires. Of course, in the ovens, everything is consumed at once.”
The chimneys behind us were working, and I had to cover my face. The odor was quite strong. Polish residents for miles around could smell it. Apparently our technology has as yet perfected no way to stifle the stench of burning flesh.
I now saw the first files of Jews approaching. They were made to run from the barracks area to the small forest. Women tried to hide their breasts, their pudenda. I saw one woman, still wearing underpants, pleading with a guard to let her keep them on. Furious, he slapped her face, then yanked them from her legs, ripping them apart.
Voices drifted up to me. “Don’t carry on, don’t worry,” a guard was saying in Polish. “It’s only a delousing operation. Once you’re out and free of lice, you’ll get your job assignments.”
I stared for a while at a woman holding a child in her arms. Two old people supporting one another. A beautiful young girl with soulful eyes. Suddenly she began to scream at a guard, “I am twenty-two! I am twenty-two!” He silenced her with a blow with a rubber club. I wondered why such a lovely woman had not been pulled out for service in the camp brothel. It is no secret that such an institution is maintained—several, in fact, both for officers and for enlisted men and rankers. But the women are largely Poles and Russians. Himmler is strict about “race defilement,” hence, I suppose, even a Jewish Venus cannot be spared from the fires.
Pfannenstiel wandered off to study the door, to look through the peephole—the chamber was not in operation—and Hoess took me aside. “So Kaltenbrunner got rid of you.”
“That’s not true.”
“I’m told he wants you to get a bellyful of this. I hear your stomach isn’t too strong, too much desk work in Berlin.”
“It is quite strong enough, Hoess.”
“Yes, I imagine it is. You helped us get Zyklon B.”
The professor returned, and Hoess took us into the vast chamber. He pointed out the shower heads, the pipes, the faucets, the tile walls.
“We’re managing twelve thousand a day here, when they’re all going,” he said.
Pfannenstiel was impressed. “Incredible. At Treblinka I’m told you processed a mere eighty thousand in half a year.”
“That lousy carbon monoxide,” said Hoess. “Bad stuff. Slow. Sometimes we had riots. The Jews suspected what was in store for them and raised hell. Here, we get it over fast, and they stay fooled right to the end.”
“Or want to stay fooled,” I said.
“What’s the difference, as long as the job gets done quickly and efficiently.”
He showed us the conveyor belt, the ovens with the gas jets burning inside. There was a charred, sickening odor.
“We run forty-six ovens like this,” Hoess said. “In addition to the outdoor burning pits. So you can see it’s a big operation.”
“How many can this one take?” I asked.
Hoess thought a second. “Top, about twenty-five hundred. Not counting small children. We cram them in pretty well. You’ll see. That is, if you want to see.”
“Where are these people from?” I asked, as we walked back into the chamber. I noticed the gutters along the wall, for drainage of blood and other fluids, I imagined, and for easy cleaning. There was a huge electric fan at one end, which, Hoess, explained, was used to clean the gas out when an operation ended. The Sonderkommandos had to rush in, and using canes and crooked sticks with which they dragged the dead by the chin, load them on to the conveyor.
“They are directly off the trains,” Hoess said. “This morning’s transport. From all over Europe—France, Holland, Poland, Germany. The Führer is getting his wish.”
“And the ones who are spared?” I asked.
“They’ll go eventually. They’re a bit tougher to fool once they’ve been assigned to work in the camp. They know by then, but they go anyway. Life isn’t exactly paradise in the barracks, so I suppose this comes as a sort of relief to them.”
Hoess pointed to an aperture on the roof. “That’s where the crystals are thrown in. A better system than the old diesels.”
Hoess began to complain about his problems in stockpiling Zyklon B. It deteriorates, and a special distribution system has been organized to keep him supplied. He heard about the intricate holding company set up to manufacture, sell and ship the stuff, and he is a bit piqued. He knows huge profits are being made on the sale of Zyklon B and he feels he should have a share. The party bigshots, the industrial moneymen, are reaping profits from the sale of the gas, while he and others like him do the work that creates the demand.
“We’re about ready,” Hoess said.
He led the professor and me to a high point, from which we could see the Jews being herded from the cover of the trees to the open steel door of the big chamber. The music continued in back of us—lilting, gay, as if we were spending a spring morning in the park.
“How wonderfully compliant they are,” Pfannenstiel said. “Almost a religious rite. You know, I am no theologian, but I have discussed this with churchmen and they feel that in a way, the Jews are being sacrificed so that Europe may be saved from Bolshevism. That is to say, they should feel … well, Christlike, holy … for providing this service.”
Hoess glared at him. “Nonsense. I’m a serious Christian with a Christian wife and children, and what you say is garbage. They are vermin. They corrupt everything. I get my orders and obey them, and there is no theology involved.”
He went on to explain how the Sonderkommandos extract gold teeth from the dead, glass eyes, artificial limbs, shave the women’s hair, before loading the bodies onto the moving belt. They work swiftly, so the next batch can be processed. Twelve thousand a day is a miracle, and Hoess deserves credit.
Below, a sergeant was shoving a group of hesitant older people: “Move, move. Five minutes, and you’ll be out, all nice and clean. Then a warm bed, coffee and cake. Move.”
To my amazement, when the chamber appeared absolutely crammed, the guards began passing small, screaming children over the heads and arms of the people already in. It was as if every last cubic meter of space had to be used.
“It’s important that they all go in,” Hoess said. “We don’t want any of them getting back to the camp with stories that will upset the others.”
The steel door slammed shut. The walls were very thick, and it was almost impossible to hear any sounds from inside the chamber. The music had gotten louder.
On the roof of this chamber were some odd mushroom like contraptions, and a sergeant of the SS was now removing the cap. I had noticed a German army ambulance parked below. Now, a soldier bearing a can—that familiar can like the one I saw in Hamburg not long ago—climbed up the side of the chamber. He tossed it to the man at the “mushroom.”
Hoess nodded at the man. I learned later that this was the famous Sergeant Moll.
Moll twisted the lid off the can and held it away from his face. Then he emptied the bluish crystals into the “stem” of the mushroom, saying as he did, “Okay, give them something to chew.”
We waited a moment—Pfannenstiel, Hoess and myself.
Then a murmuring noise, like a wind rising, a low-pitched howling, seemed to issue from the chamber. Hoess left us to look through the viewing hole. He invited us to go along. Pfannenstiel had already seen what it was like inside. I made some excuse.
“Yes,” the professor said. “It takes about twelve minutes. They claw and scratch and try to get to the door, but it is hopeless. There is often a great deal of blood and feces on the bodies. I would suggest, Major Dorf, you not look, when they open the door. It takes a bit of getting used to.”
He kneeled and put his ear to the roof of the chamber, and smiled. “Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. It sounds like the wailing one hears in a synagogue.”
Berlin
May 1943
In an effort to curry favor with Kaltenbrunner, I arranged a screening for him of some of the operations at Auschwitz.
He seemed pleased with the photographs I had projected in his office, where once Heydrich sat. I told him of Hoess’ excellent administration—assigning the healthy to I. G. Farben, Krupp, and Siemens, where they are worked to death, dispatching the useless to the chambers.
At one point Kaltenbrunner quoted Himmler, after looking at a photograph of the bodies jammed together like a scene from Dante’s Inferno at the door of the chamber. “The boss has said that what people call anti-Semitism is really delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology, it’s a matter of cleanliness.”
The reasons we have for killing Jews are manifold. For Himmler it is “delousing,” for Heydrich it was a multi-level political tool, and for the Führer it is the be-all and end-all of his world view. So be it. I obey. Thoughts of the naked children being passed over the heads of their parents, and into the chambers, flit through my mind. But to Kaltenbrunner I say nothing. What is there to say once one accepts the need for the program?
When the screening had ended, Kaltenbrunner’s hideous face was actually smiling at me. “Dorf, you’ve taken to your new assignment with your usual dedication,” he said.
“Thank you, General.”
“You can go now.”
I paused. “I meant to talk to you about this new job. It keeps me in motion all the time—Poland, Russia. I had hoped for a permanent assignment to Berlin. To make your job easier.”
“No, no, Dorf. I want you in Poland. I want you close to the camps. There are reports the Jews are getting fractious, rebellious.”
Again, I hesitated. I feared him. “It’s the problem of my wife, General. I hate to bring it up.”
“Ah. A little cheating while Papa is away?”
“Not at all, sir. Mrs. Dorf is ill. She’s had a weak heart for some years. These prolonged absences of mine are having an adverse effect on her. Food shortages, the bombings …”
“Take her to our hospital. A vacation. Nothing is too good for the wives of SS officers.”
“That’s kind of you, sir. But she needs me … here.”
Kaltenbrunner swung his huge legs around, got up. He towered over me. “You astonish me, Dorf. Our armies are being bled white at Stalingrad. The whole Russian front is blazing. The Allies are working their way up Italy. And you complain about a sick wife.”
Once more I appealed, and once more Kaltenbrunner rebuffed me. He referred to the rumors about me—my alleged left-wing connections, enemies I’d made. I tried to defend myself, but he had no further need for me. Briefly I felt like Hamlet, comparing his dead father to Claudius—like Hyperion to a satyr. So was my fallen chief to this brute, this dull-headed glandular savage.
Tonight there was more than the usual tension between Marta and me. Since Heydrich’s death (it’s already a year ago), she has sensed in me a fear, an uncertainty, a loss of the surefootedness I enjoyed while he lived.
I have begun to drink a bit. I’m no drunkard, but a few glasses of cognac at night help to relax me. Tonight Laura was asleep. Peter was off at a training camp. (There are rumors that fifteen-year-olds will be organized into “wolf pack” defense battalions if the Russians ever breach our lines defending Germany.)
Suddenly Marta opened a manila folder and began to read aloud. I knew at once what she had—copies of letters I had written to camp commandants. I made no effort to stop her, kept drinking, and listened.
Her voice was mocking, edged with a sneer. “‘All corpses buried at Babi Yar must be dug up and burned. Not a trace is to remain. Blobel, your work was sloppy and left vast areas untreated. This is highest priority.’”
“You had no right to look at those.”
“I like this,” she went on. “To Hoess. ‘I am not satisfied with the system for taking the burned remains to the mill for grinding into ashes. Can we not develop a furnace that destroys everything? And how long can the Sola River absorb these tons and tons of ashes?’”
“Stop.”
“Or this,” Marta went on. “‘Better control must be exercised over the medical experiment programs. I realize the Reichsführer’s fascination with twins, but I am told some non-Jewish sets of twins have been used by the doctors. This is bad policy. I also would like a full report on the sterilization-by-injection experiments, as well as the program to sterilize Jews by X-ray. Why all this fuss over a sterilization program, when their eventual fate is known to all by now?’”
She slapped the letters down.
“Those were not for your eyes, my dear,” I said wearily.
“Oh, I’ve suspected for a long time. All that talk about executing spies and saboteurs, controlling disease behind enemy lines.”
I was too exhausted, mentally and physically, to talk to her. Finally I said, “And now you are disgusted with me.”
“No. I want to help you.”
I had no idea what she meant. I assembled the carbons of the letters and replaced them in the folder, making a mental note not to keep such documents in the apartment any more.
“What did Kaltenbrunner tell you today?” she asked.
“I go back to Poland tomorrow.”
“You didn’t stand up for yourself? After all you have done for them, Erik?”
I poured another cognac. “It doesn’t matter where—Poland, Russia, here. The walls will soon tumble.”
She sat next to me on the sofa. We have acquired, through Eichmann’s generosity, a marvelous collection of fine furniture from his warehouses in Prague. They go well with the old Bechstein.
“It does matter,” Marta said. “Kaltenbrunner must sense this … this … air of defeat in you when you speak to him. No wonder your career is at a dead end. You are lucky Heydrich promoted you before he died. These letters … the tone in them … it sounds as if you are revolted by your work, ashamed of it.”
“Perhaps I am at times.”
Her voice rose. She grabbed my wrist. “You can’t be! You must go on! If you—if we—stop now, the world will assume we are guilty. But if we go on, and explain what we are doing, we’ll succeed!”
I leaped from the sofa, spilling cognac over the Turkish rug. “Good God, Marta, how I misread you! Gentle Marta!” I began to laugh. “And I thought you were furious with me because I am up to my neck in the blood of Jewish children!”
“Don’t say it! Don’t!”
“And all that outraged you is that I’m not prouder, not more energetic in my labors!”
She was shrieking at me. “You must be! Do what you are told, to the very end! That will convince people that what you are doing is right! Obey, obey, like Hoess, like Eichmann. But every time you look doubtful, or question something—like these experiments—you help dig our graves!”
I laughed again, collapsed on the sofa.
“And don’t laugh at me!”
“I’m not. I’m amused by my own stupidity. Of course. I must enter my work with more eagerness, more enterprise.”
For some moments she stared at me. Then she turned down the overhead light. The only illumination in the room was from a fine cloisonné lamp, courtesy of Eichmann. Marta kneeled in front of me, rested her golden head in my lap, put her arms around my waist.
Her voice was ghostly. “Erik … sometimes I am afraid we will be punished.”
“Punished?”
“All of us.”
“You’ve done nothing at all. And I have been a good soldier. Un bon soldat, as Eichmann would say.”
“Those letters. The ovens. The pyres. The experiments. A river full of ashes.” She looked up at me. Her eyes were dry. Her lips looked drained of blood. “That’s why they must all die. So no one knows. So no one is left to tell. So that no one can tell lies about you. Do you understand?”
I stared at her, drew her close. But our bodies were cold, and we could not make each other warm.
All through the latter part of 1942, the ghetto was drained of Jews—to Treblinka, Auschwitz, other death camps. And still the people went in silence, with only minimal acts of resistance.
Dr. Kohn, the most cooperative of the council, had taken his own life with a cyanide pill. He did so after Hoefle, the SS commandant, had increased the daily quota from six thousand to seven thousand.
As yet, no resistance could be mounted against the Germans. There were simply not enough guns, virtually no ammunition.
But my father continued his little deception at the rail station clinic, saving a dozen people now, a half-dozen later, convincing the authorities that his “branch” of the hospital had been authorized.
One day, he and my mother looked from the draped window. The Nazis had a new trick. People were offered a loaf of bread and a tin of marmalade as an inducement to board the trains. They stood dumbly, weary, confused, waiting to board—clutching their precious bread and jam, hopeful to the end.
That day, Zalman had been ordered to the train. My Uncle Moses boldly plucked him out of the crowd, explained to a kapo that the man was terribly ill, and walked him into the clinic.
“Go to the sink,” my father ordered. “Vomit. Jam your finger down your throat.”
Zalman looked worried. “They were eyeing us. Hoefle’s out there.”
“I’ll handle them,” my father said.
Moses, standing watch at the window, now saw Hoefle and a man named Karp, the ghetto police chief, approaching.
“They’re coming,” Moses said.
“Berta, leave by the rear door,” Papa said. “Go to the school. Better hide with someone. Zalman, go with her.”
The two left. Almost the instant my mother and Zalman had departed, Hoefle and Karp entered. The latter was a tool of the Nazis, a converted Jew who had earned the hatred of everyone in the ghetto.
Karp barked, “Everyone on their feet!”
Papa protested. “These people are ill.”
“Shut up, Weiss. On your feet in front of Major Hoefle.”
The half-dozen people in the small room got to their feet.
“What in hell is going on here?” asked Hoefle. He and his officers rarely set foot in the ghetto. They governed through underlings—noncoms, Ukrainian militia, ghetto cops.
“A branch clinic of the hospital, sir,” my father said.
“They don’t look sick to me,” Karp said. “Where’s the written authorization for all this?”
“It exists,” my father said. He struggled to control himself. “I can’t help it if your office is inefficient.”
The ghetto police chief and the SS officer wandered around the clinic—picking up the bottles on Uncle Moses’ tiny dispensary table, inspecting under beds.
“What kind of racket are you running here, Weiss?” Karp asked.
“I am Dr. Weiss, Karp.”
Hoefle smiled at this: Jew against Jew.
Karp stopped at a cot on which a young woman reclined. She was a cousin of Eva Lubin, a woman who had said she would fight in the resistance.
“What’s wrong with you?” Hoefle asked her.
“Fever.”
Hoefle—he was a vicious killer, formerly an Einsatzgruppe officer—gently put a hand to her forehead. He looked at Karp, said nothing, and the two of them left.
My father and Uncle Moses watched them depart. They knew now they could expect the worst. But they were determined to keep up the pretense; perhaps some miracle would result in their being bypassed. My father again tried to convince Karp that it would be a mistake to let diseased people ride the trains. But Karp would not let my father into his office.
Hoefle lost no time in striking.
It was learned later—through an informant in Karp’s police force—that the clinic was to be burned, and everyone in any way connected with it sent out on the next transport.
The first blow fell on my mother.
She was rehearsing the children in Jewish folk songs, village airs that she had gotten them to sing for her (quite a change for that grand lady, so proud of her Mozart and Beethoven), when Karp and an aide entered the classroom.
Her presence was so dignified, so calm, that he was subdued, apologetic. “Excuse me, Mrs. Weiss,” he said. “You must come with me.”
“May we rehearse the song once more? It’s for the children’s musicale.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“May I see Dr. Weiss?”
“Your husband will be at the station.”
At once she understood what was about to happen. Calmly (so one of her students told me) she got her coat, her pocketbook, and said goodbye to the children.
“You coming back, teacher?” asked Aaron Feldman.
“Of course. In my absence, Sarah, will you take the class?”
The oldest girl nodded, and went to the front of the room.
“If I am gone for some time,” my mother said, “you are not to neglect your lessons. You will be better people for being educated, for knowing Shakespeare, and the Pythagorean theorem. Goodbye, children.”
They bid her goodbye. They had seen people leave for the rail station a thousand times; they knew about the transports.
At the station, the usual mob of seven thousand were being assembled, registered, grouped. My mother looked at the small clinic and saw that it had been destroyed. She glared at Karp.
“I’m under orders, Mrs. Weiss.”
Lowy and his wife were also on the transport. My father had rescued them once. But now, the printer had been swept up in the newest roundup of victims. Mrs. Lowy was bawling uncontrollably.
“Cut it out,” Lowy said. “How bad can it be? Be glad to get out of this hole.”
Soon, my father, carrying two valises, appeared. He was allowed to take some of his medical supplies. He wore the dusty, battered Homburg he had worn making calls in Berlin, the same dark topcoat.
He and my mother embraced.
Lowy and his wife greeted him. “Sorry, doc. You tried. I guess we’re just destined to get shipped out together all the time.”
“Yes,” my father said. “Fellow passengers again, Lowy.”
The people on the shipment were a cross-section of the ghetto—the poor, the starving, middle-class Jews, and even relative aristocrats like my parents.
My father tried to joke. “You know, Berta, I almost feel as if Lowy is an old classmate.”
The Umschlagplatz was a dreary, depressing place—a yard about thirty by fifty meters. Around it ran a high brick wall and the rear of an abandoned building. Those scheduled for transport were herded through a wire fence. Inside, they sat on bags and valises, bartering for food, trying to cook, making last-ditch efforts to be released.
My parents remained there twelve hours with the Lowys and hundreds of others before the trains arrived. It was a terrifying time. At one point, two young men tried to escape. They sneaked into the abandoned building and tried to cross from its roof to the adjoining house. The SS guards shot them down. Older people began to moan; children wept. There were no toilets. People relieved themselves in corners of the vast yard.
“I wish they’d get on with it,” Lowy said. “The family camp has got to be better than this.”
“Yes,” my mother said. “I believe we were ready for a change. Isn’t that so, Josef?”
And yet all had been told the truth of the transports by my Uncle Moses: they were going to their death. Still, they tried to joke, to make light of the fate that awaited them. The guards were soon doubled—ghetto cops, Latvians, SS. This meant the train was due any moment.
My father asked Lowy, “So the resistance is losing the master printer. How will they manage?”
“I’ve trained Eva. If she keeps at it, she’ll make a good pressman.”
My father nodded. The resistance. He would no longer be part of it. “What about my brother?” he asked Lowy.
“Hiding with Zalman. It won’t be easy. The Germans are sweeping out whole blocks. Anyone hiding—shot on the spot.”
At about five in the afternoon the train appeared. Again, the loudspeaker blared its orders—people were to proceed in orderly fashion into the cars, fill them, observe sanitary rules. There was a single bucket in each car for that purpose.
So they moved to the train. My mother and father went arm in arm. A young mother, holding a child, pleaded with my father for medicine. He said he would help her once they were aboard.
Karp, one of the most hated of all people in Warsaw, came abreast of my parents. “I’m sorry, Dr. Weiss.”
My father made a last appeal. “Karp, get my wife off the transport,” he said. “She’s a teacher, an interpreter. She speaks better German than your masters. Make an appeal for her.”
“No chance, doctor.”
At the edge of the surging crowd, a young man had lost his mind, was straggling to escape through the wire gate. He was being methodically clubbed to the ground.
“Josef,” Mama said. “You cannot get rid of me that easily.”
He smiled. “Oh, I was just saying goodbye to our friend Chief Karp.”
“Don’t blame me,” Karp said. “They’ll get around to me one of these days.”
“If we don’t first,” Lowy said.
They moved up the planks into the cattle cars. People ran for places near the openings in the slats. Breathing, moving, would be difficult. Lowy’s wife became hysterical.
“Stop bawling,” Lowy said. “What did you expect? The Paris Express?”
“I can’t help it. I’m frightened.”
“So are we all, Mrs. Lowy,” my father said. “But we must look at things bravely.”
More shots rang out in the Umschlagplatz. They had killed the crazed young man.
My parents entered the cattle car. My father found a place, set his valise down as a seat for the two of them. “There,” he said. “First-class reservations. I must talk to the conductor about the deplorable condition of these cars.”
She took his arm. “Josef, as long as we have each other, they cannot destroy us.”
“Of course, my darling.”
They were not aware of it, but their train was to be routed to Auschwitz, rather than Treblinka. The latter camp, more primitive, with smaller facilities, was jammed to capacity.
By January 1943, our partisan band, under Uncle Sasha’s leadership, had raided the Ukrainian collaborators three times. We had guns and ammunition, and had killed several dozen of them. The time had come to attack the Germans.
On a snowy New Year’s Eve, we gathered in a woods outside the town of Bechak, where an SS garrison had newly arrived. Samuel, the rabbi who had married us, conducted a brief service, as the soft, silent snow fell, covering our fur hats and heavy coats. Most of us wore boots stolen from the Ukrainians. We were all thin and hungry. Food was hard to come by in the winter, and we were forced to be on the move all the time.
“Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” Samuel intoned softly.
I had forgotten how to pray. Bar-mitzvah, high holidays, those had been the extent of my religious training. We attended (when we did) a reformed synagogue, with much of the service in German. I noticed that Uncle Sasha did not join in the prayers.
He and I stood to one side, protecting our rifles, waiting.
“What about you, Weiss? A prayer or two?”
“I don’t know how.”
“I know how, but I won’t. Not after my family was murdered.” He looked up at the wintry sky. The snow came down in powdery clouds, almost caressing us. “Give us a quote, rabbi, something that will help Jews going into battle.”
Samuel finished his praying, smiled at Uncle Sasha and said:
“‘And David said unto his men—gird ye on every man his sword.’ Amen.”
There were seven of us in the party—all men. Sometimes the women went on raids. But against a German garrison, Uncle Sasha had decided that only men should fight. The rabbi left us to return to our camp.
Soon we saw the lights of the village of Bechak. It seemed far away, on a different planet. The party came to a halt. I suddenly became the center of attention. They removed my fur hat and put a German helmet on my head. I took off the loose tunic I wore. Under it was a German army overcoat, belts, ammunition case. I carried a Mauser rifle.
Sasha stared at me. “You’d fool me.”
“I almost fool myself.”
“Ready? Start walking. We’ll be a hundred meters behind you, one group on your right, one on your left.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Remember something else,” Sasha said. “Kill fast.”
I walked alone, keeping to the countryside, plodding through the snow. Cold, frightened, I thought of my brother—doomed to rot in prison forever, it seemed. Of Anna, dead under circumstances that filled me with suspicion. Of my parents, living in the hell of Warsaw. (I was unaware that they had been sent to Auschwitz, or what their fate was.) And of my grandparents, dead by their own hands, unable to face the horror.
Soon I was in the town. It looked beautiful, like a painting, in the snow. A dog howled at me. The streets were empty. In all occupied towns, curfew was strictly observed.
We had scouted the town earlier. Yuri, disguised as a tinker, had wandered through the village a week earlier. The Germans had set up their headquarters in the town hall. They were an SS unit, probably sent to round up any remaining Jews. Their appetite for killing us was insatiable. We were not sure how many were there—perhaps a company, perhaps only a platoon. In any case, the enlisted men’s barracks were at the edge of the town, in an old mill. But the officers were quartered in the town hall.
I entered by a side street. My boots crunched in the snow. There were two sentries on duty outside the hall. It was brightly lit. I could hear singing from inside. Of course. A New Year’s celebration. The Germans had Russian and Ukrainian whores and girl friends.
The sentries passed one another in front of the hall. Then one moved on, vanished from view. I hurried out of the side street and walked briskly up to the remaining soldier.
“Hell of a way to make a man spend New Year’s,” I said.
“Hey … who are you?” he asked.
“Battalion messenger. The goddam phone is out again. I have a message for the captain.”
I’d come upon him so brazenly that he did not even ask me for the password. He was very young and small. And I sounded like, and looked like, an ordinary German soldier.
“What captain?” he asked.
“How the hell do I know? Wait, here it is.”
I dug a paper from my coat pocket and gave it to him. The sentry walked toward the reflected light from the town hall and squinted at the paper. I got behind him.
“Looks like Captain Van Kalt. Isn’t that what it says?”
“There ain’t no such captain. What the hell—”
I whipped a leather cord around his neck, dug my knee into his back and wrestled him to the ground. All the anger that had boiled inside me these years found itself in my arms, my hands. He struggled awhile, then stopped. I yanked the leather thong a few more times to make sure. Then I took his rifle. I dragged the body to the side of the stone steps and pressed myself against the building.
In seconds, the other sentry turned the corner. I played no games with him. Instead I leaped from the brick wall and smashed at his neck with the rifle butt. His helmet flew off, and before he could shout, I’d batted him again. His head exploded.
Uncle Sasha and the others came racing out of the shadows.
“Yuri and your men, the back door,” Sasha said. “The rest of us, in the front. Go in firing, but for God’s sake don’t hit one another.”
We plunged into the main room of the hall, without warning, without a word.
There were a dozen German officers in the room, and perhaps an equal number of women. A young lieutenant was playing the piano.
They all seemed weary, sated. It was not a very happy New Year’s party; and we did not make it any happier.
Uncle Sasha fired the first bursts and killed three men near the door. Yuri shot the man at the piano, and he fell noisily on the keyboard. The women shrieked. Some—men and women—fell to the floor. A captain rose, holding his hands high.
Uncle Sasha grabbed him by the collar. “The gun room.”
“All right. Don’t kill us.”
“Fast. Yuri, guard the others. Everyone else with me.”
The captain—he had been slightly wounded in the arm—unlocked the gun rack. We festooned ourselves with machine pistols, rifles, handguns. Each of us took as much ammunition as we could carry. There was a medicine chest, and we took that also.
“Can you manage that, Weiss?” Sasha asked me. He was pointing to a light machine gun.
“I’ll try.” I picked it up, balanced it on my shoulders and followed them into the main room.
Inside, Yuri had started to bind the hands of the remaining Germans. But Sasha was in a hurry. “There’s a faster way,” he said.
He led us through the door. Then he ordered us to hurl grenades into the headquarters. We did. The explosions lit up the whole village; we knew that the soldiers at the main barracks would be on our tail any minute.
We began to run.
I felt the bullet slam into my shoulder. My back turned wet, warm. I got to my feet, but had to drop the machine gun. Yuri and another man helped me. When we got back to the camp, I was in a dead faint.
I next remember Uncle Sasha cutting my clothing away. I was on my side. The disinfectant clogged my nose, burned my back.
Then I heard a snipping, and the pain in my shoulder became unbearable. I howled. And on top of my howling, I could hear Helena screaming.
“Stop! Stop! You’re hurting him!”
She ran to the opposite side of the cot and began to kiss me, but she kept shrieking.
Uncle Sasha’s voice boomed over her screams. “Quiet! Get away from him, or I’ll throw you out, wife or no!”
“You’ll kill him with your damned stupid raids!” Helena yelled.
“How is it, Weiss?” he asked.
“It hurts like hell.”
“I’ve almost got the bullet out. We can’t spare the morphine for this kind of thing. Hang on, you’ll be all right.”
The snipping and clicking of Sasha’s medical instruments bothered me almost as much as the pain. Until he began to probe deeply, stabbing at nerves. The disinfectant, some kind of potent Red Army concoction, helped. My mind was so distracted by its harsh odor that I gritted my teeth and grunted, determined I would not scream.
My father, examining my bruises once after a rough game played in the mud, decided I had a high threshold for pain; I could take a great deal. “It’s common among athletes,” Papa said, smiling. And almost added—“and those who are less intelligent and sensitive.” But I’m sure he didn’t mean that. It was simply that I was expected to be the family roughneck, and I obliged. Just as now, with a bit of male bravado, in front of my wife, I would not yell, howl, or complain.
Helena wept, sat down on the edge of the cot and kissed the back of my neck.
“Worse pain once,” I chattered. “Worse … broke my ankle … didn’t play a whole year.”
Sasha growled at her. “Get out of my way, dammit.”
“No.”
“Then it’ll take longer and he’ll suffer more.”
Yuri, standing to one side, staring at my blood staining the blankets, tried to calm everyone. “It was worth it. One man wounded. And what a haul—rifles, machine guns, ammo. We must have killed eight of them.”
Helena jumped from the cot. “I don’t give a damn about your haul!”
“Ah, hell, it’s still bleeding,” Sasha said. “Hand me one of those bandage packs.”
He worked on me for another fifteen minutes. Helena refused to leave the cot, stroking my head, kissing me. Finally, Sasha held up the misshapen slug. He had swathed my back in bandages.
“There it is, Weiss,” he said. “From a Mauser. Something to show your grandchildren.”
Yuri laughed. “Have it gold-plated.”
Helena grabbed it from Uncle Sasha’s hand and hurled it against the wall. “Stop! Stop! I hate all of you! I can’t stand this damned joking, as if it were some kind of game! Sure it’s a game—but one we can never win! He’s almost bleeding to death and you make jokes about the bullet that almost killed him! I’m sick of this camp, and this useless war and the way you think you’re accomplishing something. So you kill a German here, a Ukrainian there—what of it? One day we’ll all be dead … one winter more will kill us all…
Her voice became a choked, heaving sob. She fell on her knees and began beating the icy logs of the hut, screaming all the time that we were all doomed, that we might as well give ourselves up to the Germans.
“I don’t want any more … I don’t want any more …” she kept sobbing. “No more … no more …”
Uncle Sasha assembled his medical kit and nodded at Yuri, as if to say, “This is between man and wife.” They started for the door. I turned painfully on my elbow.
“You did that almost as good as my father,” I said. “Nobody could tape the way he could.”
Sasha smiled at me. “Sorry I never met him. Maybe someday. I’ll see if we have anything to help you sleep. You may have to settle for the last of the cognac.”
They left. Helena crouched in a corner, wiping her tears away.
“Come to me,” I said.
She got up, came to the cot, and sat beside me again. Even in bulky winter clothing, felt boots, she was beautiful. Her hair had been cut short. Her face had seen no makeup for years. And still she shone, a woman to be stared at, desired, loved.
“Oh, Rudi… you could have died. And for what?”
I held her hand. “To show them we are not cowards. That they can’t keep killing us and get away with it.”
“But they are killing millions, we know it. And so few fight, so few escape.”
“All the more reason for us to fight them.”
We said nothing for a while. She rested her head on my chest, and I stroked her cropped hair, kissed her ear. Each move sent a jolt of pain through my shoulder and arm, but at least the bleeding seemed to have stopped.
“Tell me again how much you love me,” I said.
“More than ever.” Then she began to cry again. “But they’ll come looking for us. They’ll know where we are. Someone will tell, someone will be tortured. Then we will all be—”
“You once said we’d never die.”
“I don’t believe it any more,” my wife said.
“We’ll live, you’ll see. You’ll meet my parents, Karl, Inga. And they’ll all love you as much as I do. They’ll joke about a Czech in the family, but it’ll just be a joke.”
She smiled at last, stroked my forehead. I was afraid then, afraid of dying, and so was she. We loved each other too much. The enemy would make sure that our love would be killed. But we dared not tell each other how afraid we were. It was wrong of me to talk about my family, and happy reunions. It made it harder to deceive ourselves.
Finally, she looked up. “Rudi, I have something to ask of you.”
“Anything.”
“The next time you go out to fight with Sasha and the men, I want to go along.”
“Oh, no.”
“Some of the women do. Nadya does.” “Not my wife.”
“But I must. I must be with you all the time.”
Her eyes were solemn, shadowed. It had been four years that we had been together, and it was a lifetime. We had suffered much, seen horrors, survived, fought, and learned to be passionate, tender, understanding. And most of all to read each other’s minds. We could hide nothing from each other, nothing. I knew what she meant. There was a good chance the Nazis would catch us someday. They and their local allies were determined to wipe us out. It was reported that a Waffen SS battalion, had been brought into the area, to find us and crush us.
Our luck might run out someday. Helena was telling me—I knew it, I saw it in her face—that she wanted to die with me.
“I’ll talk to Sasha about it,” I said.
Sasha came in with the cognac. He patted Helena’s head. “Visiting hours are over. Patient has to get his sleep.”
For reasons that I still do not understand, my brother Karl was permitted to live for several months in the isolation of the Kleine Festung.
In that curious, unpredictable way in which the Nazi bureaucracy worked, both he and Frey were beaten from time to time, and Frey died after a few weeks. But Karl stayed alive—barely—in a dark cell. He was almost a skeleton, his eyes unaccustomed to light, his voice reduced to a croak. And his hands, the hands of an artist, were two deformed lumps of flesh and bone.
One day the guard came and unlocked his cell.
“Let’s go, Weiss.”
“Don’t beat me again,” he begged. “I’ll die this time.”
“No more beatings. You’re luckier than your friends Frey and Felsher.”
“You killed them.”
“They wouldn’t talk.”
“I won’t either.”
The guard shrugged. “Who cares any more? They’re sending you to Auschwitz. Lovely place, nicer than here. A family camp. They treat the Jews better there than the Germans get treated in Berlin.”
Some truly lunatic business followed. Karl was marched into the office of Commandant Rahm and made to sign a “confession” admitting certain crimes against the Reich. Rahm said that when the war ended, he, Karl Weiss, artist of Berlin, Jew, would have to stand trial for “serious crimes against the German people.” Karl signed. What did it matter? He was already one of the, walking dead—what long-term inmates called a “Mussulman.”
Then he was told he had a half-hour to see his wife before being put aboard the transport for the “east.” Theresienstadt was now in the process of being emptied. Every day trains left for some destination in Poland. It was Auschwitz, of course, and everyone was assured it was a “family camp,” that there they would be joined—parents, children, old folks—and be given fruitful work, good food, a decent home to live in.
When Karl staggered into the studio for the last time, Inga let out a cry. His striped uniform hung loosely on his frame. He was bearded, hollow-eyed, bent over like an aged cripple. Spittle kept forming in the corners of his mouth.
She hugged him. Maria Kalova and a few of the artists who had not been involved in the conspiracy came forward.
“Oh, they have let you free, Karl,” Inga said. She and Maria led him to a chair, found some tea for him. He tried to hide his hands when they offered him the metal cup.
“Oh, my beloved Karl,” she cried. “What they have done to you … your hands.”
The others were ashamed to look on. They moved away. Maria went to her drafting table. The SS kept them at work turning out “morale” posters, warnings to behave, promises of wonderful days to come.
“I am still alive,” Karl said. His voice was lost, distant. “I never told them. Are the paintings safe?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Maria and I hid them.”
He nodded. “I’ll never paint again. They made sure of that.”
Inga grasped his broken hands and began to kiss them.
“You can’t make them well again. The way my mother used to kiss my bruises when I was a little boy. It didn’t work then.” He looked at his hands. “They say one gets used to it. But you never do.”
“Don’t talk about it.” On her knees, she put her face against his hands.
“In the Kleine Festung, to keep from going crazy when they beat us, Frey and Felsher and I kept shouting that we would go to Italy. Florence, Venice. Frey insisted on Arezzo, too.”
“We’ll go there, dearest Karl, I promise.”
He shivered, hunched over, rested his head on her yellow hair. “We will never see Italy as man and wife. My brief moments of courage are over.” He sat up. “They’re sending me to Auschwitz. They’re finished with me. I suppose I’m not even worth killing, the way they murdered Frey and Felsher.”
“You won’t leave,” she said. “If they send you, I’ll go also.”
He shook his head.
Maria Kalova left her table and walked over to them. She looked at them for a moment, then said: “You can’t, Inga. You must tell Karl.”
“Tell me … ?”
“At least, here in Theresienstadt, you have a chance, Inga,” Maria went on. “You can work, they will spare you, but…”
“What are you talking about?” asked Karl.
Inga looked up at him. “Karl. Your child is in me.”
“Child … ?”
“Ours.”
He began to tremble again, shoved the teacup away, held her at arm’s length. His arms were like thin pipes. “No. You mustn’t have it.”
“But I will. That is why Maria says I must stay here. Children have been born here. At least there is a clinic, and they will look after me.”
“I’ve seen the children born here,” he said. “They’re cursed for the rest of their lives. Their eyes show it.”
“It need not be that way.”
Maria stepped forward. “The women will protect Inga, as long as they can. We’ll be good to the child.”
“No,” my brother said. “If you love me, end its life before it opens its eyes in this damned place.”
“No, I won’t. I want your blessing. I want you to sanctify its life. Oh, Karl, I sometimes think I am more of a Jew than you, or Rudi…”
“I want no child born here.”
“The rabbis say each life makes God’s name holy. Please, Karl.”
“They did not see Theresienstadt.”
Maria said, “Karl, she is right. You must let Inga have her baby.”
He lowered his head to his hands. “All right. It doesn’t matter. It’s a child I’ll never know.”
Inga said, “But you will. I promise you.”
A kapo entered, stopped in the doorway. He was rounding up people for the transport. He said nothing.
Karl looked at him, got slowly to his feet. He whispered to Inga, “When the child is old enough, show him the paintings. So he will understand.”
They kissed for the last time.
“Goodbye, my beloved wife,” he said. “Perhaps all will go well. Perhaps they are telling us the truth. I’ve been saved at Buchenwald and at Theresienstadt because I could paint. Perhaps it will happen again.” Then he looked at his clawlike hands and laughed bitterly.
She would not let him go, kept kissing him.
Finally, Maria had to separate them, as the kapo, slapping the truncheon against his leg, entered the studio.
“You must let him go, Inga,” Maria said.
“Goodbye, Karl. Goodbye, my love.”
They watched as he was shoved into a line of confused, frightened people—the once privileged inmates of the “Paradise Ghetto”—destined for the death camp. The guards ordered them to march off.
My parents were in Auschwitz. But Uncle Moses, now an active member of the Jewish Fighting Organization, had escaped the roundups. There could not have been more than fifty thousand Jews left in the ghetto, from a peak population of almost half a million. And those that remained were ill, hungry and terrified.
On January 9, Himmler visited the ghetto to see with his own eyes the pitiful remnants of European Jewry. He ordered a final total liquidation. Every last Jew was to be sent to Treblinka or Auschwitz.
The Jewish Fighting Organization, numbering about six hundred activists, but supported by perhaps a thousand other “irregulars,” decided to make a stand when the next roundup occurred. It was becoming harder and harder for the Germans to deceive the Jews. All the promises of family camps, the bread-and-marmalade, were now known to be lies.
On a day in mid-January, my Uncle Moses and Aaron Feldman, pretending to be peddlers, shoved a pushcart toward a section of the wall that had been evacuated.
A ghetto policeman warned them that there would be a curfew in ten minutes.
Uncle Moses tipped his hat. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We’re just getting our merchandise home. Pots and pans, you know.” Then he whispered to Aaron, “Don’t worry. He was bribed.”
As dusk fell on the wintry, deserted city, the man and the boy approached the wall.
Aaron leaped onto the cart, and with the aid of a grappling hook and a rope, scaled the wall. He kneeled on the top and whistled softly.
Two men from the Polish resistance—one was the man named Anton—ran from a doorway. They tossed a wooden crate to Aaron, who in turn dropped it to the cart below. The procedure was repeated with a second crate.
Then Aaron slid down the rope. Uncle Moses put the crates under the dirty canvas covering his “wares” and they started back to the resistance headquarters.
“You’re late,” the ghetto policeman said.
“My apologies,” Uncle Moses said. And as he walked by, he bribed him a second time.
In these final months of the ghetto, whole neighborhoods had been emptied—the inhabitants either wiped out, or shipped to their death. It was in secret apartments in these areas that the so-called “illegals” now lived, the resisters, the fighters, the ones determined not to be led away praying and weeping.
To an apartment on the upper floor of what appeared to be an uninhabited building, Uncle Moses and Aaron carried the crates they had gotten from the Poles. It was a piddling contribution. No section of the resistance, the various Zionist groups, the Bundists, the left, had been able to make a dent on the Christian Poles. Some sympathy, yes. But little in the way of arms.
Eva Lubin and some others were present as they opened the crates. There were five new revolvers in one, and ammunition for them. There were also grenades.
“How do we start an uprising with these?” Moses asked.
“It’s a beginning,” Eva said. “Let’s start loading them.”
They began inserting bullets into the revolvers.
“If we can kill a few,” Eva said hopefully. “Then get their machine guns, their rifles. To add to our small arsenal. We might make an impression.”
“I’m not sure they’ll oblige us,” Moses said. “The word is they are going to bring in Waffen SS and Lithuanian auxiliaries. A building-by-building sweep. We may be too late with this.”
Moses picked up two guns, twirled them. “I’m not a very convincing cowboy. I wasn’t meant for this sort of thing. Jews and guns don’t seem to go together.”
There was a signal-type rap at the door—two short raps, a pause, then three more. Moses nodded at Aaron to unbolt the door.
Zalman entered, out of breath, covered with dust. He had crawled through mounds of rubble to reach them.
“The SS has blocked the street,” Zalman said.
“The roundup?” Moses asked.
“Yes. Von Sammern’s announced it. The last of the Jews are to come out.”
“But why here?” Uncle Moses asked. “This is a deserted neighborhood. It’s supposed to be empty.”
“They may have followed you and the kid.”
Moses took command. “Pack everything. Everyone take a gun. Grenades in pockets. Hide the crates. We’ll leave by the rooftops.”
As they obeyed his orders, they heard German voices below, boots kicking against doors, orders being shouted.
“Jews out!”
“All Jews out!”
“Come quietly, we mean no harm!”
Aaron ran from the room and peered down the stairway. Far below, on the ground floor, he could see three soldiers kicking in doors. Thus far they had found no one. The building, except for the apartment in which the fighters were hiding, had long been deserted.
Aaron and the others could hear the voices.
“What the hell are we looking for in this dump?”
“Someone said the Yids are supposed to have stolen guns.”
Moses ordered everyone to stay in the apartment. He sent Eva and Zalman and Aaron into closets and the adjacent room. He himself wedged behind the door.
They could hear the Germans outside the door.
“Go on, you’re always bragging what a hot shit you are.”
“Bust it in, they’re only fucking Jews.”
“Think I’m afraid? Afraid of Jews?”
Boots, rifles, heavy bodies slammed against the bolted door. It splintered, gave way. The Germans entered the room.
Moses came from the corner and shot the first man in the face from a distance of no more than a meter. He fell, his face a crimson splotch.
The other two, before they could aim their rifles, were hit by a hail of bullets from Eva and Zalman.
One, less badly wounded, dragged the other out to the stairs.
Zalman took the machine pistol from the dead soldier’s hands. Aaron ran into the hall, threw a grenade down the stairwell. The soldiers lurched, stumbled, rolled in gray-green heaps to the ground level.
The Jews looked at one another in amazement.
“They ran,” Moses said wonderingly. “My God, they ran. At last I’ve seen it. They bleed and die and they are frightened—like us.”
Aaron flew down the steps and yanked the arms and ammunition belts from the other two soldiers, then raced back up the stairs.
In the room, Zalman made a decision. “All of us out. They’ll be back in force. Across the roofs. I’ll go first.”
Heavily armed now, they fled down the corridor, and climbed the metal ladder to the rooftop door.
All over the city now, sporadic fighting had broken out. Anelevitz himself had led an attack on a party of Germans escorting Jews to the Umschlagplatz. With five grenades, five pistols and a few Molotov cocktails, they had won a partial victory, liberated some Jews.
Still, the Germans managed to deport 6,500 Jews during this January battle. But it was far less than they had anticipated.
All over the ruined city, new leaflets from Lowy’s old press began to appear, to encourage the Jews to fight.
The German occupying forces have begun the second stage of extermination!
Don’t go to your death without a fight! Stand up for yourselves!
Get hold of an ax, an iron bar, a knife—anything—and bolt the door of your houses! Dare them to try and take them!
If you refuse to fight you will die!
Fight! And fight on!
After the firelight at Moses’ apartment, and several other battles throughout the city, some of the resistance fighters assembled at another apartment. There they learned that many of their comrades were dead. The Germans had been fought off at the Toebbens workshop in the center of the city, but at a high cost in Jewish losses.
In the second flat, Moses’ group was met by others. They distributed the machine pistols and the rifles they had gotten in the first battle.
Aaron, at the window, saw a truck of SS soldiers enter the street. The truck emptied, but this time the Germans were cautious, hugging the sides of the buildings, wary of fire.
Zalman demonstrated the machine pistols to the others. “Don’t aim it like a rifle,” he said. “Just spray shots.”
“I want one,” Aaron said.
Moses patted his head. “Wait till you grow up.”
Moses was at the window. He saw the SS men spreading down the street. He smacked a hand in his fist. “By God, the time has come to fight them on our ground.”
As he spoke, four Germans entered the building.
“In the hallway,” Moses commanded. “Fire when I give the order.”
They ran into the corridor, hid in broom closets, behind the stairs—Moses, Zalman, Eva, Aaron, others.
This time the Germans were unable to kick a door in.
They were blasted with guns and grenades from above, and could not return the fire. They staggered back, bleeding and dying, to the street, piled into their trucks and left.
“I can’t believe it,” Zalman said. “They’re going going …”
“They die like anyone else,” Moses said.
There was no doubt about it. The Germans, in that battle of January 1943, were giving up the fight—for a while. They had never counted on Jews firing back.
Later, as the resistance leaders gathered at the headquarters on Mila Street, stories came back to them of the courage—often doomed—of the Jews, who were denying the Nazis their attempt to clean out the ghetto.
Apparently a young woman named Emilia Landau was the heroine who started the resistance. When the SS invaded the carpentry shop where she worked, she threw the first grenade, killing several SS men. But in the firefight that followed, she was killed.
At the headquarters of Kibbutz Dror, another battle took place—here the Germans were forced to retreat.
And around the Umschlagplatz itself, where my father had once so pathetically tried to save handfuls of doomed people, a score of running battles took place.
Some supplies now came in from a few sympathetic Poles outside the walls. The majority refused to help. There was even a group of Fascist Poles who warned their brethren not to aid the Jews, because the fighting was a ruse—the Jews would join with the Germans to crush the Polish resistance. (Their Fascism did not help them; the Germans intended to stamp them out also and make slaves of those who survived.)
Among the supplies sent in were land mines, grenade launchers, a mortar, and one machine gun.
“At last,” Zalman said.
“Yes,” Uncle Moses said bitterly. “All paid for. Cash on the line.”
Eva asked, “Is there any hope they will join us?”
Anelevitz shook his head. “It is unlikely. They do not want to spill Polish blood in our behalf. We have learned by now. Only we can save ourselves.”
“Save?” asked Moses.
“Yes,” the young Zionist said. “Even if it means we die. We are still saved.”
My uncle cocked his head, gingerly looked at the flat land mine, packed in waterproofing grease. “What does the Talmud tell us about assembling land mines?” he asked. No one laughed.
Anelevitz pointed to the calendar. “Remember the day, January 21, 1943. In the ghetto, we are at war.”
On arriving at Auschwitz, my parents were spared the immediate trip to the gas chambers.
The selection was done at the railroad siding, by an SS officer in immaculate uniform. Those deemed unfit for work were sent to their deaths at once. My parents, in comparative good health—all these things were relative in the camps—were marched to separate barracks.
Papa was assigned for a while to the camp infirmary, a dismal mockery of a place, some more of that grim German humor. He did the best he could to treat the ill and injured. It mattered little. The first sign of weakness, of uselessness to the masters, and people were marked for a trip to the “delousing” area. Virtually no medicine was available. It suited the Nazis to let people die in the barracks area. It took a load off the four gassing complexes, the forty-six ovens.
My mother worked in one of the kitchens with Chana Lowy.
Although men and women prisoners were kept in separate parts of the camp, my father, as a physician, was able to slip away now and then and visit her.
One day he came with what all felt was remarkable news. One of the medical orderlies who had done some work in the SS barracks had heard the Germans talking in low, saddened voices. An entire German army was said to have surrendered at Stalingrad. Not a division, mind you, but an army.
Papa tried to cheer my mother up. She was sitting on the edge of the bunk she shared with Lowy’s wife, and sewing. Life in the camps was a nightmare of filth, lice, hunger, foul water, thin soup and moldy bread. She, who had presided over elegant dinners and played Mozart on the Bechstein …
Over her bunk she had placed photographs of Karl and Inga in their wedding clothes, and one of Anna and me. I know the photo. I’m wearing a striped soccer shirt, holding the ball under my arm. Anna’s just kicked my shins because I teased her. But you can’t see it in the photo.
“If they catch you here you’ll be punished, Josef,” my mother said.
“It’s all right. Lowy forged a pass for me. Besides, I’ll say I’m making a call.”
“Josef, you’ve become a daredevil.”
He kissed her cheek. “And how are you?”
“I’m fine. There’s a rumor that a group of us in this barracks, all who are strong enough, and that would include me and Mrs. Lowy, will be taken to work at the I. G. Farben factory tomorrow. That’s surely good news.”
“Perhaps they need a concert pianist.”
“Or perhaps you could hire me as a nurse.”
They both knew the rules at Auschwitz: those with no jobs, no skills, not needed to run the camp, or supply labor for the factories, for the giant corporations that kept the German army moving, did not last long.
“At least you are safe in your hospital job,” she said.
He did not tell her that orders had come down to cut the infirmary staff by a half. Seniority would prevail; as a newer member he would probably lose his post.
Chana Lowy leaned over from the top bunk. “Max says there’s road work to be had. Some German engineer, he’s looking for people to build roads.”
Lowy worked in the camp laundry, but it was not a safe place. The weakest, least likely to survive labored there, and it was often no more than a way station to the chambers.
“Road work?” asked my father. “That sounds good. Outdoor work.”
“Oh, Josef, you?” my mother laughed. And they hugged each other again.
They heard a woman kapo outside, hurrying new prisoners to the barracks.
“You must go, Josef.”
He held her in his arms. “They have consigned us to hell, Berta, but we must defy them. I insist we try to live, to sustain ourselves. I think a great deal of the boys, and of Inga.”
“I too. I cannot forget them.”
“Something tells me Karl and Rudi are alive. If one of us should die, the other must find them. And love them, stay with them. There must be a family Weiss again, Berta. Grandchildren, a home. Do you understand?”
“Of course I do.”
“Not just because we are one family, and united to each other, but because we are Jews. If they wanted so terribly to destroy us, then surely we are people of value, of worth. Perhaps we even have something to teach the world.” He blinked, shook his head. “My goodness, I sound like a lecturer, a rabbi.”
There was a commotion at the door to the barracks. A woman kapo entered, dragging a slender young girl with her. The girl could not have been more than seventeen. Once she slumped to the floor, and the kapo yanked her to her feet by her hair.
The kapo spied my father. “You. Against rules. Out.”
“I’m leaving. Medical visit. I’m Dr. Weiss.”
“Don’t let me see you here again.”
My father left.
The woman kapo shoved the girl into the crowded, fetid room. At once, the girl, making moaning noises, sank to the floor on all fours.
“Find her a place, any place,” the kapo said. “She’s crazy.”
My mother got from her bunk. “What did you do to her? No. Don’t strike her again. I’ll look after her.”
“I didn’t do anything. She got off the train yesterday like this. She was all right until they sent her parents for delousing.”
“And why can she not see them?”
“Who knows? Maybe it was an extra-long delousing shower. Or they went to a different part of the camp.”
The women prisoners were silent, somber. They knew what the showers meant.
“See she don’t mess herself,” the kapo said. She left.
The girl was thin, very pretty, with long dark-brown hair and dark skin. My mother knelt beside her and stroked her back. “It’s all right, my child. We won’t hurt you here. Are you hungry?”
The girl would not talk, but she rose and embraced my mother. On the breast of her ragged cloth coat, next to the yellow star, someone had pinned a tag: SOFIA ALATRI, MILANO, ITALIA.
Chana Lowy joined my mother and they helped get the girl to her feet, and to one of the wooden berths.
“Are you hungry, my child?” my mother asked.
Mrs. Lowy suggested they might find some bread in the next barracks; one of the women, a former prostitute, was a notorious trader and usually had some extra food.
But the girl would not speak. She buried her head on my mother’s chest and continued to moan.
“Do you want some water?” asked my mother. She even tried talking Italian to her; through her musical training she spoke fairly good Italian.
But Sofia Alatri seemed beyond help. And so my mother decided that affection, just the warmth of another human body, was all she could offer. It is odd, as I write this, from information I received from a woman who was in Auschwitz in that very barracks, how clearly I can see the scene. My mother had that talent for endowing any place she was with dignity and charm. She behaved elegantly and politely, and thus hoped to change the world.
“It’s hard to remember that we are more than names on a tag,” my mother said. “Or a blue number tattooed on one’s arm. We’re all people, yes, and we still are, dear Sofia. People with names, homes, loved ones. They cannot take that from us.”
“But they have,” Chana Lowy said. “That’s how they’ll finally do away with us. No names, nothing. So we’re not anything any more.”
My mother began to brush the girl’s hair, and Sofia stopped moaning. The touch of a human hand, the sense of love, and warmth, perhaps.
“Poor child,” my mother said. “You make me think of my daughter Anna. How can people be so cruel? How can they do such things to innocents?”
“It’s an old story,” Chana Lowy said. “When you have nothing else to do, pick on Jews. We were in their way, that’s all.”
My mother put her arm around Sofia. “You can talk to me. I am your friend.”
The girl covered her face. Still, silence.
My mother took the photos down from the boards over the bunk. “Look. My children. They are such good young people. Like you, my dear.”
Sofia said nothing. But she looked dumbly at the old wrinkled photos.
“My Karl. And his wife Inga. That’s Rudi in the striped shirt. He’s twenty-four now. You would like him. So handsome. And that’s Anna next to him. She would … would be … a bit older than you.”
“They’ve scared her wits out of her,” Mrs. Lowy said. “You know, I’m as frightened as she is, but I try not to show it.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” my mother said.
“Well, maybe work tomorrow. I mean, real work, in the factories, where they need us.”
Sofia began to shiver. My mother put a blanket over her shoulders. One small stove, usually cold, was all that any barracks had.
“You’re cold, Sofia, come sit closer. Tell me about your family. Your mother and father. Oh, I know about Italian Jews, they are very fine people. Sephardim, scholars. Tell me about Milano.”
Chana Lowy shook her head. “Nothing. They’ve killed her mind. Maybe she’s better off not remembering. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with Jews, they remember too much.”
Mama held the girl’s chin up and looked into her eyes. “So beautiful. Like my Anna. Come, I’ll sing to you.”
Sweetly, softly, my mother sang the Lorelei, rocking the girl back and forth in her arms.
For a few moments there was no sound in the barracks, except for my mother’s singing. Some of the women joined, humming softly. Some wept, with memories of the lives they had once known—homes, families, meals together, children going to school, weddings, all the happy fragments that make for a good life.
Then there was silence.
Two women kapos and an SS guard carrying a machine pistol stood in the doorway.
The first kapo spoke. “Everyone in this barracks fall out.”
“Why?” a woman asked. “We’ve had our medical inspection.”
“You have work for us?” Chana Lowy asked.
“No questions,” the SS man said. “Just fall out.”
“Nothing to be afraid of,” the kapo said.
But they all knew. Those that did not know, pretended not to. The deception would take place to the very end—and the self-deception.
“Hurry along, ladies,” the SS man said. He was a squat, pockmarked man, one woman recalled, unfit for front-line duty. “Form a double file outside, fast.”
“It must be for the jobs,” Chana Lowy insisted.
My mother combed her hair. She would go to the end neat, clean, as proper as she could make herself appear. “I am afraid not, Mrs. Lowy. We must do as they tell us, and do it with dignity.”
The Italian girl would not get up when the others rose. The woman kapo lunged at her with the truncheon.
“Stop!” my mother cried. “Don’t touch her.”
“She’s crazy.”
“She will come with me. Do not hit her.”
My mother, Berta Weiss of Berlin, musician and housewife, daughter of a hero of the First World War, then lifted Sofia from the bunk and held her close to her. She kissed her cheek.
“You will walk with me, Sofia,” she said.
Outside, the older women were helped along by the younger. They knew. I am told this was a common occurrence. When the transports were light, when Hoess’ chambers and ovens were slack, entire blocks of barracks would, without warning, be emptied. No excuses saved anyone; no privileges mattered. It was a matter of getting the job done, of filling quotas. The goal was twelve thousand a day, and the Führer and Himmler would have their twelve thousand.
They were marched across the barracks area, under guard, out of a gate, and toward the famous rows of trees Hoess had planted. Ahead of them loomed the concrete chamber, with its long flat roof. It was wintertime. The famous women’s orchestra was not serenading guards and victims that day.
In the freezing cold, they were ordered to undress. Clothing was piled neatly. Valuables taken for “safekeeping.” They were advised that the fumigating, the delousing, would take about five minutes. Their property would be returned as they left.
“You’ll be better fit for work,” the SS men told them.
And they stared at the naked women.
“Help her, she’s crazy,” the woman kapo said, pointing to Sofia, who had again fallen to the ground. My mother and Chana helped her undress. She seemed pitiful, defenseless. The Reich was doing away with its mortal enemies.
“You’ll feel better afterward,” a guard shouted.
Apparently, the undressing of the women was an event, a diversion, for many of the SS men. They gathered in groups, grinning, nudging one another. Their bestiality had no limits. No one has yet explained it to me.
My mother turned to one of the women kapos—a Jew like herself, and one who with the Sonderkommandos later dragged the corpses out and to the ovens—and said, “I am Berta Weiss of Berlin, and this is Chana Lowy, my friend. Please tell our husbands what happened.”
The woman nodded. Kapos and Sonderkommandos, too, when the time came, would be committed to the chambers.
It was cold, damp, and it almost seemed that some of the women welcomed death. Or they preferred to believe to the end that the Germans were not lying.
“They say it’s good for the lungs,” an old woman said to my mother.
“Breathe deeply,” the guard said. “Hold the children high, so they can breathe it in. It’s good for you. No colds, no coughs.”
Chana Lowy began to weep.
“Be brave, Chana,” my mother said. She was holding Sofia erect, talking softly to her.
“Less than five minutes, you’ll be out,” the guard said.
A young red-haired girl broke from the ranks of people being marched from the trees to the opened metal door. They caught her. She screamed, howled, begged, refused to join the line of march. An SS officer appeared. He ordered her dragged behind the trees. Two shots were heard. There was no more screaming.
“Move, move,” the guards shouted. “It’s only a shower room.”
My mother paused at the door, turned her head toward the camp, and said, “Goodbye, Josef. I love you.”
The camp records reveal it was a slow day. Only seven thousand were gassed. The bodies were consumed by the gas ovens and the ashes thrown into the Sola River that flowed near the camp.
My father and Lowy missed selection for the chambers that same day, through a stroke of luck.
Lowy had mentioned that a road-working detail was being set up, and that it meant a good long assignment. By a freakish coincidence, both he and my father were pulled out of their jobs—where people were being randomly selected for death—and assigned to the road team.
Outdoor work usually meant an extra ration of food. It was also rather unusual for Jews to last on this kind of work any length of time. They were held in contempt as laborers by the Germans. Poles or Russian war prisoners were preferred.
But the day after my mother was murdered—my father had no knowledge of it—Lowy and Dr. Josef Weiss found themselves spreading hot tar over a road on the outskirts of the barracks area. It was vital work, providing a new link between one of the factories making armaments and a railhead. Eichmann and his transports of Jews had so clogged the railway lines in and out of Auschwitz that war materiel destined for the front was often sidelined, or was delayed.
The work was arduous at the road-building site. But it was work that would last. Moreover, the man in charge, a German civil engineer named Kurt Dorf, had achieved something of a reputation among the Jews. He was alleged to have saved hundreds of Jews by selecting them for work, by insisting they were good laborers, and somehow keeping them out of the clutches of Hoess’ insatiable underlings.
Dorf was a tall, weathered man, soft-voiced, slow-moving. (I have since met him, and, of course, knew about his testimony at Nuremberg. He and I have corresponded quite often, and as will be seen at the end of this narrative, he let me see Erik Dorf’s diaries and other papers.)
The fumes of the hot tar, the backbreaking work, made my father dizzy that first day, and he staggered.
“You okay, doc?” asked Lowy.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine.”
“Maybe you should go to the hospital.”
“You must be joking, Lowy. That’s where they damned near selected me for special treatment. Thank God this engineer grabbed me. I’ve learned a lesson. You do work they need, you survive.”
“Maybe,” Lowy said cynically.
They looked up at Kurt Dorf—tall, pipe-smoking, in his civilian coat, reading a set of blueprints.
“That guy Dorf,” Lowy said. “He isn’t like the rest.”
“Because he’s spared our life?”
“Sure. He’s hid maybe five hundred of us on his jobs. I heard the SS guys wanted to get rid of him.”
My father bent to his work on the hot tar. “Strange. Where are the others like him? Only thirty-three percent of the Germans voted for Hitler in 1933. What happened to the other two-thirds?”
“They got to love him. Or the Nazis scared everyone. Jail, murder, torture. They showed the world how. Listen, I was in the printers’ union with lots of Christian guys, friends, Socialists. Where are they? They joined the parade.”
My father all but fell. He walked away from the roadbed, rested on one knee. The fumes were affecting him.
Kurt Dorf saw him and walked down from the construction shack in which he had his office. “Are you ill?” he asked my father. “No, no, just a bit tired. I’ll get back to work.” Kurt Dorf halted him. “What is your name?” “Weiss. Josef Weiss.”
Lowy piped up, from the road: “Dr. Weiss.”
“Medical doctor?” the engineer asked.
“Yes. I used to be in general practice in Berlin. I had my own clinic.”
Kurt Dorf looked at my father for a moment. A small supply truck had driven up. Supplies were being unloaded. “Why don’t you work on the truck the rest of the day?” he said. “It’s not as arduous.”
My father nodded, started to walk away. Then he turned. “We are grateful to you. We know what you are doing.”
Dorf was embarrassed by this. A party of SS, led by an officer, had appeared and were waiting for him at the construction shack. Blueprints rolled under his arm, he turned and walked toward them.
Auschwitz
February 1943
Pleasant surprise at Auschwitz today, on my weekly visit. Well, pleasant up to a point.
I found my Uncle Kurt at work on a new road-building project. This place is so vast and complex, so much work is being accomplished here for the war effort, that it is possible not to know about a relative or a friend who may be employed here. Kurt was at the Buna artificial rubber plant for some time, redesigning buildings, and now he is working on the road to I. G. Farben.
We shook hands, a bit coolly at first, then embraced with a good deal more warmth. I wanted to enjoy the privacy of the reunion, so I dismissed my aides.
“So,” he said. “Uncle and nephew reunited. How are you, Erik?”
“Well enough. Let’s see. When did we last see each other? Christmas two years ago in Berlin, correct?”
“With Marta and the children. Silent Night around that beautiful piano.” He smiled. “Good to see you, Erik.”
“And I’m delighted to see you. Reminder that I have a family.”
Kurt then invited me inside his tiny office in the wooden shack. He said he had some real coffee—not ersatz—and we would celebrate our meeting with a cup.
We were silent awhile, sipping the hot coffee, looking out of the large glass window (the shack was on a height) at the city that had grown out of Auschwitz. Distantly, the four high chimneys smoked.
“Your roads have been a great help to us,” I said. “Not only for the transport of war goods, but for prevention of contagion, simplifying disposal procedures.”
He looked at me strangely. “I understand there is a great deal of disease in this camp.”
“Oh, yes. The Jews are a filthy people.”
“I imagine there is also infection among those who run it?”
“Some.”
“Not of the body so much as of the spirit. Of the soul, perhaps.”
I sensed where the discussion was moving. Kurt had always had a bit of the moralist in him. Never a party member, he could not understand our goals, our long-range policies.
“You’ve gotten even more righteously indignant, Uncle. What we do, we do out of necessity.”
He got up. “You need not lie to me. I am of your blood. Save your lies and deceits for those thousands and thousands of innocent Jews you are murdering in this place. Yes, and Russians and Poles, and anyone else you deem an enemy.”
I said nothing, crossed my legs.
He walked away, suddenly spun about. “Why in God’s name must you strip them naked before they die? In the name of all that is decent, can’t you leave them with a shred of dignity before you murder them? I’ve seen your SS louts grinning at Jewish women, those poor souls trying to cover themselves. I never really believed in Satan, or that there was pure evil in the world, until I came here.”
“It took you a long time,” I said quietly. “You were at Babi Yar.”
“Maybe I wanted to believe your lies. Like so many of our countrymen.”
“Uncle, you are defending criminals, spies, saboteurs. These Jews are spreaders of contagion, both physical and political. We are sanitizing Europe, eventually the world. More people agree with us than you imagine.” I spoke calmly, rationally, trying to make clear to him my commitment to my duties.
Kurt looked at me with icy blue eyes; the harsh eyes of my father when he had caught me in a lie. “I heard a remarkable story the other day,” he said. “In January, the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto revolted. They actually killed German soldiers, forced the SS to retreat. Think of it, Erik, those unarmed, despised, terrorized people, fighting back against the lords of the earth. It almost restores one’s confidence in Divine Providence.”
“Almost. But not altogether.”
I had heard about the rebellion in Warsaw in January. It is rumored that the Jews are still arming, preparing to resist our efforts to dislodge the last fifty thousand remaining there. It is of no consequence. In the end we will prevail. But I felt I owed my father’s brother something. Engineer though he was, road builder, he could find himself in deep trouble expressing such sentiments.
I looked out the window at his road gang. “I am told you have been using several hundred Jews as laborers. Extra rations, privileges. There are Poles available.”
“What of it?”
“Jews are marked for special handling. They are to be worked until they are useless and then marked for special handling.”
“Say what you mean, Erik, say the word. Murder.”
I ignored him. “I shall find you some Red Army prisoners. Strong backs and dull minds. They can replace your Jews. If we let the Jews survive, they will destroy Germany someday.”
“I want you to leave my workers alone.”
“You curry favor with enemies of the Reich, is that it? The children of these Jews … the children we send …”
To my astonishment, he ran at me and grabbed my collar, almost tearing the insignia off. I am not a physical man, I never have been. I detest violence, fighting. My Uncle Kurt is tall and well muscled. Years of outdoor work have made him powerful. I felt the strength in his hands. He shook me as if I were a puppy.
“I should strangle you with my own hands, you bloody murdering bastard. As a favor to my dead brother. How many dead will satisfy you, Major Dorf? A million? Two million? How many bodies will you burn over there before you are secure? Dammit, Erik, show me some sign of humanity before this ends, show me that there is something decent left in you!”
“Take your hands off me.”
He hurled me against the wooden wall. I did not resist him. I was armed, of course, but it was unthinkable to draw my weapon. Besides, his anger had subsided into a kind of sick disgust.
Straightening my uniform, trying to ascertain whether any of my men had witnessed the embarrassing scene, I tried to tell my uncle precisely what Marta, with her womanly intuition, had said to me recently. Persuasively, I told him that if we were to stop killing Jews now it would be an admission of guilt. When one is convinced of one’s rightness, one cannot halt a course of action simply because it is distasteful, or because others misinterpret it. Therein lies real courage: doing what is often sickening and apparently brutal, but is necessitated by a great goal, a far-reaching plan.
“What we do is a moral act,” I said, “a historical imperative.”
He came at me again, and I thought this time he would surely kill me.
But he stopped short, and whispered, “I understand too well. I understand all of you too well. Get out.”
His anger, his irrationality, concerned me. But as long as he does the job for Hoess, builds roads, modernizes factories, he is useful. Besides, he apparently keeps his traitorous views to himself—except for me.
The day after my mother was gassed to death, my father learned of it. In the evening, after he and Lowy had finished their work at the road-building site, they had, with forged passes, made their way to the women’s sector.
There they found an empty barracks. A woman kapo, one of those who had marched my mother off to her death, told him that all the women in that block had gone to the gas chambers.
The men broke down and wept. There was little they could say to each other, no words of comfort.
Someone told me that my father went in and sat on my mother’s bunk for a long time. He went through her valise, touched her meager belongings, and took from it a folder of piano music—her old, yellowed, fraying music, from our home on Groningstrasse. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Vivaldi.
“Goddam them,” Lowy wept. “Why doesn’t anyone ever say no to them? Why don’t the Allies bomb the railroads here, the ovens, the gas rooms?”
My father had neither answer nor solace for him.
On Sunday, April 18, 1943, the Jewish Fighting Organization, in which my Uncle Moses, once a timid druggist, was now a key member, learned that the Germans were preparing a mass attack on the remaining Jews. It was to start at two in the morning of the following day.
Anelevitz called his subcommanders together. Weapons were given out. Key points in the ghetto were manned. It would be a fight to the death. Of actual armed combatants, of which my Uncle Moses was one, there were about five hundred.
What they did not know was that Von Stroop, the SS general in charge of the operation, had seven thousand men ready to destroy them—Waffen SS, regular army including artillery, tanks and planes, two battalions of German police, Polish police, key members of the SD, and a battalion of Ukrainian, Latvian and Lithuanian auxiliaries.
The armed Jews were sent out in small groups to three main areas of the ghetto—the central area near Nalewki and Zemenhof Streets, and the factory area near Leszno Street.
Inside an apartment on a high floor, Uncle Moses and Zalman sat at a window, waiting. The room was dark, but the family who owned the apartment, incredibly, were preparing for Passover. A woman was setting the table with candelabra, matzohs, the haggadah.
In Uncle Moses’ detachment, besides Zalman, who sat with him at the window, were Eva Lubin and Aaron. Aaron slept at the rear of the room, atop an ammunition case. In the areas I have mentioned, similar small parties of armed Jews waited. The streets were deserted.
Zalman yawned. “Passover, Weiss. April 19, 1943.”
“I’m afraid you and I shall have no seder,” Uncle Moses said.
“We could have attended one last night. The SS invited us. Didn’t you hear the sound truck they sent through?”
“Oh, indeed,” Moses said. “Did anyone go?”
“Not even Elijah the Prophet.”
“A pity. I might have gone if I didn’t have this job. You know, Zalman, when I was a kid, I never got to ask the four questions. Maybe last night General von Stroop would have given me the honor.”
“Perhaps. Before shooting you.”
Eva recalls my uncle suddenly reminiscing about his brother and sister-in-law, my parents. A bachelor, he had no family left. He missed them, wanted them.
“Yes,” Zalman said. “We could use a doctor now.”
“To treat the wounded?”
Zalman nodded.
“My inclination will be to shoot them if they cannot be rescued. We know what kind of people we are fighting.”
They talked about new rumors—a platoon of Jewish police, who were supposed to take part in the attack, had been executed by firing squad; Himmler had come to Warsaw to witness the end of the ghetto.
“I wish there were more than a handful of us,” Moses said.
“These people,” Zalman said, not without sympathy, “these people, our people, they were not trained to shoot guns.”
“Was I?”
Both men peered into the dark street. Zionist banners hung from many buildings—the blue-and-white star, the blue bars. There were also Polish flags and appeals to the Poles to join the fight. To the end, there was hope that they would.
Moses spoke. “Tomorrow is Hitler’s birthday. The SS has promised us as his birthday present. Warsaw will be cleaned out to celebrate the Führer’s anniversary.”
“Candles on his cake,” Eva said.
Moses sighed. “I never thought I would be resigned to dying. But I am. That fellow Anelevitz taught me a lot. The world will know we did not all march off, docile, dumb, accepting.”
A light went on in the rear room.
“Put it out,” Eva ordered the woman.
“I’m cleaning up for Passover.”
“Clean up in the dark,” Eva said.
“Passover,” Zalman said. “Still they observe. I’m not critical of them, Weiss, just speechless. Maybe we needed less tradition, fewer prayers—and more guns.”
An old man in the rear of the room was praying—shawl, skull cap, opened prayer book. He bent and swayed in holy ecstasy.
“Be tolerant, Zalman. This was their life. They knew nothing else, and it kept them together for a long time. Maybe it will keep us together when this hell ends.”
From the street below, there were drum beats, martial music. The gate to the ghetto had swung open and a detachment of ghetto police, unarmed, walked into the empty streets. Behind them were the foreign auxiliaries. They carried rifles, machine pistols.
A sound truck now appeared and stopped in the midst of the square. From its speaker, a friendly voice issued forth:
“A happy Passover to our Jewish friends! Put down your guns! Come out in peace! We shall arrange a seder for you! Forget this foolish battle, for you are being led by traitors who only seek your death, while they escape!”
Uncle Moses, who had practiced shooting in the basements, raised his rifle and blew the loudspeaker apart with one shot. It dangled on broken wires.
The truck went into reverse. On orders barked from SS noncoms, the ghetto police and the auxiliaries formed battle lines. They were not leaving.
The drums began to beat again. They marched farther into the street. It had been agreed upon earlier by Anelevitz and the other commanders to save ammunition for the Germans.
“First our miserable police,” Zalman said.
“Let them pass,” Moses said.
Eva wriggled to another window and leveled her gun. Aaron slipped off the ammunition chest and moved forward, bringing boxes of bullets with him, extra guns.
“Lithuania, Latvia, the Ukraine,” Moses said. “The old familiar faces.”
“Hold fire,” Zalman whispered.
“Someday I shall look a Latvian in the eye and say, ‘Brother, I spared your life in the Warsaw ghetto.’”
Incredibly, they kept marching in. Now there was a battalion of Waffen SS in the square. They set up desks, field telephones, a kitchen. It was a major military operation.
“Now!” Zalman shouted.
There were massed volleys from a dozen windows around the square. The Germans, singing loudly, marching smartly to the corner of Nalewki and Gensia Streets, were cut down. Their formation broke. Dead and wounded were left in the street.
From attics, balconies, and upper windows, like the one in which Moses, Zalman, Eva and Aaron crouched, a concentrated hail of fire sent the Nazi column into a confused retreat.
They could hear the German officers shouting below:
“Where the hell are they?”
“Back!”
“Take cover!”
Uncle Moses leveled his rifle again, and said, “There’s a God in Heaven after all. I’d begun to have my doubts.”
“A man could die with a happy heart seeing this,” Zalman said. “Look at them pull back.”
“For the first time in my life,” Moses said, as he jammed a fresh clip into his weapon, “I feel the blood of King David in me. Believe me, it’s better than just filling prescriptions.”
“Don’t go overboard, Weiss,” Zalman said.
Several times the Germans tried to regroup, to come back for their dead and wounded, and each time they were stopped by a wall of fire. Sometimes, Jewish groups, armed with pistols, would descend to street level and fight it out with the Nazis, building to building.
This first armed encounter lasted roughly two hours, from six to eight in the morning, and incredibly, there were no casualties among the Jewish fighters. They had caught the SS completely by surprise.
Von Stroop, the German general, who refused to enter the ghetto and debase himself by battling Jews, later admitted in his report that “The Jewish resistance was unexpected, unusually strong and a great surprise. At our first penetration into the ghetto, the Jews and the Polish bandits succeeded, with arms in hand, in repulsing our attacking forces, including the tanks and Panzers.” It was all true, except the reference to “Polish bandits”—all the fighters were Jews.
But of course the Nazis returned, and in greater force—as always shoving their Ukrainian and Baltic lackeys in front of them—but now taking cover behind tanks, no longer marching in the middle of the street, no longer singing martial airs and assuming the Jews would surrender at the sight of a German soldier.
In the apartment, at dusk, Moses and his group could hear the family reading the Passover service.
“‘When Moses was grown he one day came on an Egyptian smiting a Hebrew, and he smote the Egyptian. Moses fled from the face of Pharoah and dwelt in the land of Midian …’”
When a young boy at the table asked, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Zalman and Moses could not help smiling. Yes, it was different. Unlike any Passover in the history of the Jewish people.
“‘And it is written,’” the old man in the rear room read, in Hebrew, “‘we cried unto the Lord the God of our Fathers and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction and our toil and our oppression …’”
For a moment they all listened. Then Moses said, “Let’s join with him.”
And they all recited together:
“‘And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and with an outstretched arm, and with great terror and with signs and wonders.’”
Soon their position became untenable. Tanks and artillery entered the ghetto. Mortars began to lob shells to the upper floors and the roofs, from which the firing originated.
Moses ordered the family to end their seder. God would understand. They had to get out. A mortar shell had exploded on the roof. The woman took the sacred books, the matzoh, the plates, the wine cups. The others followed her.
A second mortar shell exploded against the side of the building. Zalman suffered a wound in his left arm from a chunk of masonry.
“We can’t hold here,” Moses said. “They have too much power below us. Everyone grab weapons, ammunition, and down to the tunnels.”
Ten minutes later, following Aaron, who knew the tunnels the way the rats knew them, they emerged into another apartment.
This apartment overlooked Mila and Zamenhofa Streets, and the buildings around it had excellent firing positions. There was at least one machine gun, and a number of hidden soldiers, armed with Molotov cocktails, grenades, and automatic rifles.
Moses and his party had the joy of seeing the first German tank that rumbled into the intersection turned into an inferno by the Molotov cocktails. The crew was burned alive. Two other tanks pulled back. Germans took cover behind them, waiting, wondering.
“They’re pulling out again,” Moses said.
“It’s the crossfire,” Zalman said. He was still firing, using one arm, as Eva bandaged his wound.
Someone unfurled another Zionist flag and hung it from the window.
“Good,” Moses said. “Let the bastards see it. Let them know who we are.”
Another German retreat was underway.
“How does it feel, Zalman?” Moses asked.
“My arm’s fine.”
“No. Watching these sons-of-bitches run.”
“Better than anything. Weiss, we have smitten the Philistines hip and thigh.”
The fighting went on for twenty days. Von Stroop, weary of his underlings failures, took personal command. For two days, with my uncle and his friends, in the thick of it, the resistance held the position in Muranowski Square. Here, Von Stroop first brought in anti-aircraft artillery, with the aim of reducing every point of resistance, building by building.
I must note that in this battle, a party of six Polish Christians, led by a man named Iwanski, entered the ghetto and joined in the fight against the Germans. They brought a new supply of arms. Four of them died fighting side by side with the Jews. These are the kind of people for whom some special memorial is needed; some tribute.
On April 23, the Jews were still fighting from scattered bunkers around the city. Himmler, furious that the world knew about the Jews’ resistance, sent Von Stroop an angry telegram:
“The round-ups in the Warsaw ghetto must be carried out with relentless determination and in as ruthless a manner as possible. The tougher the attack, the better. Recent events show just how dangerous these Jews really are.”
I am no psychologist, but my wife has studied a great deal of it. She says Himmler was a coward deep down, afraid of the weak, fearful of humiliation, exposure. After ordering the murder of millions of unarmed, helpless innocents, he now quailed before several hundred armed Jews.
On the very day Himmler sent the message to his generals, Anelevitz addressed a statement to contacts in the “Aryan” sector, in a last hope that they would enter the battle.
“The Jews in the ghetto are defending themselves at last and their vengeance has taken a positive form. I bear witness to the superb and heroic battle being fought by the Jewish insurgents….”
Slowly, the bunkers were being reduced. Night fighting became the general rule. The Germans hesitated to enter during the day. Instead they bombed from the air, lobbed artillery shells in, started huge fires. A systematic siege of the ghetto began. The resistance knew that its days were numbered. The Germans were engaged in a military campaign.
In one of the more disgusting aspects of the entire battle, Polish civilians stood around the gate outside the ghetto and cheered and applauded as Jewish men and women, burning, roasted alive in the buildings, leaped to their death.
“Another one!” they would shriek.
“And another!”
But the courageous Iwanski, the Polish army officer, came back again to fight with the Jews. His brother was killed and his son seriously wounded. Few knew about him. If many Poles abandoned us, laughed as we died, there was at least an Iwanski to uphold some honor.
By May 8, the resistance had dwindled to a handful of bunkers, from which firing could be heard. Tunnels had been explored for secret escape routes. There were few left. The Germans had also explored the underground passages and blocked many of them.
In the bunker at 18 Mila Street, Anelevitz spoke to his commanders by telephone. He begged them to hold on, to wait for aid from the outside. New appeals were being made to the Poles. Surrender was out of the question.
On Max Lowy’s old printing press—Lowy had long been deported to Auschwitz with my father—a final appeal was run off.
Their guns empty of ammunition, Moses, Zalman and others rested against the damp walls of the bunker.
“How many days, Zalman?”
“We started on April 19. It’s the ninth of May. Twenty days, and they haven’t beaten us yet.”
My uncle said, “We never gave Hitler his birthday present.”
“We did. But not the one he wanted.”
Anelevitz took the fresh sheet of paper from Eva Lubin’s ink-stained hands, and began to read:
“‘Thousands of our women and children are being burned alive in the houses. People enveloped in flames leap like torches from windows. But we fight on. It is a struggle for your and our freedom. We will avenge Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec and Maidanek. Long live freedom. Death to the murderous and criminal occupants. Long live the life and death struggle against the German barbarian.’”
A young ghetto fighter, dressed in a captured German uniform, stepped forward. Anelevitz gave him the leaflets. “See if you can get through with these. Good luck.”
Eva looked sadly at the printing press. “The last of our paper,” she said.
But the SS had scouted the area. Every possible exit from the bunker, every sewer, cellar door, aperture was being guarded.
The young man carrying the leaflets emerged from a rubble-covered cellar door, and was shot dead by two SS men.
Inside the bunker the others waited. “I have never been a very brave man,” Uncle Moses said.
“Nor I,” Zalman added.
Eva smiled at them. “You are brave enough.”
“But I learned something,” Moses said. “We all have to die, so why not make it worthwhile?”
As they talked in low voices, waiting, listening to the occasional bursts of fire in the street above, Aaron, breathless, came running back. He had led the young man in Nazi uniform to the exit. “They shot him,” Aaron said. “They know.”
Above them, they could hear voices now, the rumble of a truck, orders being shouted.
Suddenly an acrid, choking odor began to seep into the bunker.
“Some kind of gas,” Moses said. “Everyone cover your faces … use wet cloth.”
Eva recalls mothers huddling with their children. There was a lot of weeping now. An old man began to pray.
Anelevitz stood up. “It’s over,” he said calmly.
Zalman came to his side. “The pills?”
“Maybe some want to leave, take their chances outside.”
Anelevitz nodded. “They are free to do so.”
People were coughing. In addition, artillery shells were pounding the heavy walls above the bunker. The long narrow room shivered. The end was close.
Uncle Moses walked to a group of people. “Whoever wishes to leave … I will take them.”
“And I will take others,” Eva Lubin said.
Aaron and some others chose to follow Moses to one escape route. Eva would look for another—an old, disused sewer that led beyond the walls.
Moses embraced Zalman and Anelevitz. “Goodbye, my friends.”
Zalman shook my uncle’s hand. “Goodbye, Weiss. We really didn’t get to know each other too well.”
“Next time, Zalman.”
“Of course.”
Someone began to sing the songs of the ghetto. Then they sang Hatikvah, the Zionist hymn.
A column formed behind Moses, another behind Eva.
“I have the right name,” my uncle said, “but I am afraid I can lead you to no promised land. Stay in line. Aaron, you bring up the rear. Let us proceed with dignity and courage.”
He walked off. Eva went the other way.
The SS were waiting for them. Perhaps you have seen that famous photograph—the haggard, unarmed Jews, rising from a hole in the rubble, as those grinning soldiers watch, rifles leveled at them.
In the bunker below, Anelevitz and many others chose to take their own lives, like the heroes of Masada.
“You will not be harmed,” a German lieutenant said. “This is only for a search and then registration. All of you face the wall, hands high.”
They turned, Moses, Aaron, all his friends of the resistance.
“Come, children,” Uncle Moses said. “Let us all hold hands and pray. Will someone start it, please? I’m a bit rusty.”
He took Aaron Feldman’s hand on one side, an old woman’s on the other. The old bearded man who had presided at the seder twenty days ago began the Shema.
“Shema Isroel Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehud …”
They kept praying, reaffirming their faith, until the guns opened fire. All died.
Eva Lubin’s party had better luck. For thirty hours they wandered through the sewers of Warsaw. One morning, they heard an explosion above, saw daylight, and emerged on the outskirts of the city.
Contact had been made with a group of Jewish partisans. A truck was waiting. The handful who had survived the Warsaw ghetto rebellion were driven to the forests. In the city itself the resistance had ended.
Auschwitz
August 1943
More and more, I find myself away from Berlin.
Never have I seen our officials—especially Kaltenbrunner and Eichmann—more determined to get the job done. Why? I wonder. It is only a matter of time before the war is lost. Mussolini was arrested the other day. Sicily has been invaded. Our last offensive in Russia failed. There is even a chilling report that a Red Army guerrilla force, quite large, has penetrated the Carpathian front—five hundred miles beyond our own lines.
Today found me at Auschwitz, checking with Hoess to see if the supply of Zyklon B is sufficient, if Eichmann’s transports are on time.
The load on Auschwitz and the other annihilation camps—odd, how I have steeled myself to the use of that word—will be heavier. Himmler, now that Warsaw has been liquidated, has ordered the immediate destruction of all Polish ghettoes. That means one thing: more work for us.
I must note here the fact that some Europeans do not agree with our plans. The Bulgarians, for example, a Slavic people for whom I have no regard at all, have defied us and dispersed and hidden their Jews. And the Italians continue to be difficult, refusing to cooperate, sending Jews into convents and monasteries and the Italian countryside. It disturbs me that whenever our units are defied in this manner, they more or less acquiesce, and turn to other business.
In any event, on this hot afternoon, I dined in the officers’ mess at Auschwitz. Eichmann and Hoess were present. They were, as always, cool, dedicated, full of new plans. The river is becoming clogged with ashes. They are now dumping the product of the ovens in a field some distance from the camp.
From the corner of my eye I saw my Uncle Kurt enter the dining room. He avoided my eye, took a seat by himself and sat in silence, puffing on his pipe. Since the scene at his office, where he dared to lay violent hands on me, we have exchanged no words.
I was halfway through a letter from Marta when I started.
“Something wrong?” asked Eichmann.
“Good God,” I said. “Our street was bombed.”
Eichmann commented that the English and Americans were utter barbarians, without any respect for human life, the culture of cities. Churchill was a savage, unloosing his warplanes on innocent civilians, Hoess added.
Marta, in her letter, assured me that she and the children were safe in the shelter during the raid. There was some damage to the apartment. Our beautiful piano was scarred with falling plaster.
There was another bit of news in Marta’s letter. Father Lichtenberg, the troublesome priest who refused my advice regarding his sermons about Jews, died in Dachau. The circumstances are unknown. I feel a bit sorry for him. He simply did not understand the need to run with the tide, to accept the inevitable. I mentioned Lichtenberg’s death to Eichmann and Hoess. They were not interested. And why should they be? What is one more death—priest or layman, German or Pole? The important thing is to rid Europe of Jews; we all knew it; we all understand the urgency of our mission. This campaign of extermination is central and vital to everything the Führer has taught us. It is the fulcrum, the lever, the nucleus of our movement. It is not merely a means, or an end, but both the means and the end to a racially pure Europe, ruled by Nordic aristocrats.
Eichmann threw down his knife and fork. He refused to eat his cutlet. “You know, Hoess, the stink from those chimneys is awful. Gets worse every day. How can a man enjoy his lunch in this place?”
Hoess’ appetite was not affected. He drank his Czech beer, downed his schnitzel. “Can’t be helped, Eichmann. We’re still processing twelve thousand a day, top production at any camp. I hear Theresienstadt is also marked for liquidation. Romania, Hungary, they’ll all be delivering us their Jews soon. Forty-six ovens won’t be enough.”
“We’ve all got our problems, Hoess. I’m still fighting the army for trains. The bastards insist they need the rolling stock for their armies in Russia. What comes first? I asked them—Russia or getting rid of Jews? They had no answer. They know what the chief’s orders are.”
It occurred to me that as Eichmann’s and Hoess’ voices rose, my Uncle Kurt was hearing it all. He had not been eating, merely smoking, sipping his coffee, his somber face, taking it all in.
Suddenly he got up, slapped down some marks and walked past us. As he did, he looked at me with a revulsion and hatred I did not think him capable of. Then he left.
Again, I saw in Kurt’s eyes that same reproach, that same anger I had seen in my father’s face when I was a boy. Do grownups realize the hurt they inflict on children with their disapproval?
I felt a need to teach my uncle a lesson, to squelch that moral superiority he shows me, that self-appointed conscience he has become. So I asked Hoess what the policy on using Jews as laborers was. He replied that it was the same as always, but more “urgent.” That is, not only were they to be worked until they were fit for “special handling,” but that whenever possible they were to be replaced with Poles and Russians—even if they gave evidence of being strong enough to work.
“I’m told there are several hundred Jews still working on the roads,” I said, “and I have seen lots of Christians available to replace them.”
“Then they should be replaced. I can’t keep track of everything, Dorf.”
He reiterated. Every Jew now in Auschwitz, and every one who would come here, was marked for special handling. Skills, strength, privilege no longer counted. I made a mental note to send Hoess a written memorandum on Uncle Kurt’s Jews.
The blow fell on my father sometime in August 1943. I have not been able to pinpoint the date.
At some day in mid-month, he and his friend Max Lowy, who had been with him in Berlin and Warsaw, and all of their detail were summarily marched from their jobs to the gas chambers.
Papa and Lowy, and a third man—one who survived and told me—-were working a grading machine. The third man had heard news from a newcomer—the Warsaw ghetto had risen. Many Germans were killed. They had used tanks and planes and artillery to subdue the Jewish fighters. They both asked him if any of their friends had been involved; but he knew very little. The resistance was wiped out, but the Germans had needed seven thousand men to do it.
As they talked, they saw an SS sergeant approach Kurt Dorf and give him a sheet of orders. An argument ensued, but Dorf, a civilian, had only limited authority. They heard the sergeant say, quite clearly, “The detail will be replaced.”
A half-dozen SS men now appeared.
The Jews working for Kurt Dorf were ordered into a column of twos. They were told they were being taken for delousing, fumigation. A new outbreak of typhus was feared.
There was a pause. Then the men assembled. Some began to weep. One man fell to his knees and embraced the SS sergeant’s boots.
“He should not,” my father said. “Let’s at least go with pride.”
Lowy gulped. “I guess it’s over, doc.”
“Yes, you and I have had a long journey.”
“Not exactly a vacation, doc.”
They were marched off, toward the concrete buildings, the distant chimneys.
“You’ve been a good friend, Lowy,” my father said. “And I might add, an excellent patient. You always paid your bills on time, and you did little complaining.”
Lowy blinked back tears. He looked at the guards. “Doc … why don’t we just jump on them? We’ll die anyway. Take a few with us. What’s wrong with us?”
“We were trained all our lives not to.”
They walked across the hot, dusty compound, on the road they had helped build. They turned once. The engineer was standing alone, arms folded, watching them.
“Give me your hand, Lowy,” Papa said.
“I feel like a kid. First day off to school.”
My father tried to joke to ease the terror. “Lowy, did you ever have your gall bladder looked after? I’ve been warning you about it for years, ever since you first came to my office on Groningstrasse.”
“I may have it done this fall.”
They kept marching. Men stumbled. They knew.
“A hell of a way for a man to die,” Lowy said.
Someone behind them called out, “Maybe it’s what they say—just a delousing.”
Lowy nodded. “Yeah. Delousing.” He looked at his gnarled hands, a printer’s hands. “Dammit. There’s black ink under my nails, doc. Well, maybe the pamphlets helped.”
“I’m sure they did,” Papa said.
They were gassed several hours later, with two thousand others.
In September, Uncle Sasha had gotten word of a trainload of Luftwaffe pilots that was due to pass over a railroad not far from our newest camp. He decided to attempt to blow up the lines and ambush them.
We had conducted a dozen raids by now, against the Ukrainian militia and the Germans, and we felt this would be our best haul so far. We had lost men, but the family camp had remained intact under his firm leadership. We had more guns than ever, more food. It was amazing how the local farmers, seeing us armed and defiant, learned to respect us.
Helena insisted on going along. She had been on several raids—against my will—but I was especially worried about her on this one. It was too dangerous. The trains were always heavily armed with machine guns mounted fore and aft.
Sasha sent me out to tie the dynamite to the railroad ties. It was a terribly hot day. I was soaked through my khaki shirt. In the trees and bushes at the side of the railroad, a dozen partisans, including Helena, Yuri and Nadya, waited.
I had learned a great deal about explosives. None of these things are hard to learn. What is difficult is getting up the courage to put them into practice. (In Israel, Tamar says, Jews became soldiers overnight. Armed and trained, they made the world forget that they had been frightened ghetto dwellers.)
Distantly we heard a train whistle.
“There’s time,” I shouted back. I made sure the dynamite sticks were secure, that the caps were in position. The pounding of the heavy wheels would set them off. As soon as the explosion took place, we would rake the rail cars with automatic fire and grenades. It would be our biggest action to date.
I made my last knots, then walked into the cover of the foliage, unlimbering my machine pistol.
Helena stood next to me. She looked small, unprotected. But she too carried a machine pistol, and had grenades draped around her neck.
“Some necklace,” I said.
“I’m proud of it.”
I kissed her cheek. She was frightened. We all were. But we had learned not to show it. We would never plead for mercy. We would die before giving in.
Uncle Sasha had an ear cocked in the direction from which the train was due. He looked concerned.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I think they’re stopping.”
We all listened. Beyond a curve in the tracks, there came a sound of chug-chug-chug—an engine locomotive slowing down. Then the sound ended, and the engine seemed to sigh.
We waited. Seldom had I seen Sasha so upset. He nodded at me. “Rudi, sneak out to the edge and see what’s happening.”
I crawled on my belly, holding the machine pistol in my cradled arms, and reached the shoulder of the rail line. A few more yards and I could see the locomotive. It had stopped.
On the roof of the first car was a machine gun with a crew. They were standing, looking about. The train was a good fifty yards from the explosive charges I had set. Something had aroused their suspicions. Maybe it was just a security measure—they knew there were partisans in the area.
Then I saw a half-dozen soldiers come out of the train, all in combat gear. They began to walk slowly down the track, while the train remained stationary.
I crawled back to Sasha and the others.
“They’re sending men out,” I whispered.
Sasha frowned. “They’ve been tipped. Let’s clear out, as fast as we can.”
“We can take them,” I said. “Ambush them. Let them come.”
“No. Only when we have an advantage. They’ll kill us with those heavy machine guns. Everyone move off.”
We started through the woods.
Evidently the Germans suspected something, for we could hear orders being barked out, men running along the gravel shoulder. The train also edged up, but did not reach the explosives.
Then, without warning, the machine gun opened fire.
Twigs and branches split and cracked around us.
“Scatter!” Uncle Sasha shouted.
I grabbed Helena’s arm and we raced through the forest. Branches cracked at our face, clutched at our clothing. I wanted to turn and fire, to try to stop them, for I could hear them behind us—boots pounding, shouts in German, cracks of their rifles, louder bursts from the mounted gun.
And suddenly Helena was hit. She fell without a word, still holding my hand.
I stopped and kneeled oyer her. Her face was calm, pale. There was no agony on it. The bullets had entered-her back and killed her instantly. She lay there, looking tinier than ever, more beautiful, and I buried my face on her breast.
Why they did not shoot me down also, I do not know. A rifle butt smashed against my head and I was unconscious.
Some of our band had escaped. Four, including Yuri and Helena, were killed. Two other young men and I—again for reasons that elude me—were marched to a collecting point for Red Army prisoners.
The usual rule on partisans was to shoot them on sight. But perhaps they planned to torture us and get information on the entire partisan movement.
We were not fed, given just enough water to keep us from dying of thirst, and then, unexpectedly, with a great rush of action and orders, we were herded aboard a cattle car.
I huddled in a corner, and I felt I was being transported to my death. Perhaps I had cheated death long enough. I thought of Helena dying silently under the fusillade of bullets. She had wanted to come on a raid so that we could die together. Now she was gone; I lived. I felt guilty, miserable, unworthy. I should have argued her out of her foolish desire. I wept for a long time as I squatted in the rattling, noisy wagon. The trip was interminable. One of the men said we were going to Poland. He had seen road signs.
That made me certain that we were to be killed. Perhaps worked as slave laborers for a while.
Finally the train was unloaded at a town called Sobibor. We were walked for a mile or so to a concentration camp—barbed wire hung on concrete pillars, floodlights, a high fence, dogs, sentries. A bleak, dreadful place. Chimneys smoked in the distance. A death camp.
Eventually, I was assigned to a barracks, where I climbed into a bunk and fell into a long, nightmarish sleep. I dreamed of my boyhood in Berlin, the games I’d played—and it was a time of terror and defeat in my mind. When I awakened, I expected Helena to be at my side, as she had been for years. I may have even called her name. But I cried no more. A great hole had grown inside me, eaten at my emotions, my heart. She was dead. Our cause was a lost one. I would never see Sasha or my partisan friends again.
The barracks was crowded, hot, malodorous. Surprisingly, it was very quiet. Some men were speaking softly in Russian, and I caught a word here and there. I pretended to be sleeping, turned, and saw five or six rugged-looking men in tattered army uniforms sitting on a bunk. They were looking at a drawing on top of a box.
One man stood between them and me, evidently appointed to keep an eye on me.
“Mine field,” I heard him say. “Here. Here.”
I had learned a good deal of Russian in my days with the partisans and from Helena. Again, I listened.
“Barbed wire, double strands,” the man was saying. “We might need wire cutters.”
Another man asked, “What about the SS barracks? The guns on the water tower?”
“We’ll have to knock them out,” the other man said.
I soon gathered that the man in charge was a Red Army captain. His name was Barski. The man who spoke to him, his lieutenant, was named Vanya.
This Vanya suddenly said, “Captain Barski, we don’t have a single gun.”
“We will get them.”
I raised myself on one elbow. The bunk creaked. The man watching me said something to the others.
Vanya said, “The bastard, he’s awake and he’s been listening.”
He came over to the bunk and pulled me down. I struggled. We almost came to blows. Others separated us.
“Keep your hands off me,” I said in bad Russian.
Vanya tried to punch me in the stomach. I parried the blow and went for him again. He and some others shoved me to a lower berth.
“What did you just hear?” Captain Barski asked.
“I didn’t understand it. I’m a German Jew. My Russian isn’t that good.”
Barski switched to Yiddish—close enough to German so that we could talk. “Go on, what do you think we were talking about?”
“It sounds like you’re going to break out.”
Vanya shook his head. “He’s a goddam spy, Barski,” he said. “The SS planted him here. German Jew, hell.”
Barski tapped my shoulder. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Weiss. Rudi Weiss.”
“What the hell are you doing here in Sobibor?”
“Sobibor? I don’t know. I was on a train with a bunch of other prisoners. I was a partisan in the Ukraine.”
They looked at one another. Barski sat down opposite me. “Listen to me, Weiss, if that’s your name. If you’re a spy, we’ll have to kill you. This is a death camp. There’s a gas chamber here, furnaces. We’re getting out. If the Germans put you here to spy on us, I’ll strangle you myself.”
So I told them my story—running away from Berlin years ago, wandering across Europe, Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine. When I got to the part about joining Uncle Sasha, Barski’s eyes brightened.
“What did he do before he became a partisan?” the Red Army captain asked.
“He was a doctor. In a village called Koretz.”
He asked me more questions—who were some other members of the band, was there a rabbi with them. My answers appeared to satisfy him. I told him of some of the actions I had fought in—the attack on the SS headquarters, other assaults.
When I’d finished, he looked at the others. “I believe him,” Barski said. “It sounds crazy, a guy from Berlin, a German Jew fighting down here, but crazier things have happened.”
“I say kill him,” Vanya said.
But Barski was convinced. He shook his head. “Listen, Weiss, you know what happens in this camp? They gas two thousand a day. The SS men sleep on pillows stuffed with the hair from the Jewish women they murder. They have their fun knocking out the brains of Jewish children. There’s a field outside, three feet deep—ashes of the Jews.”
I nodded. “I believe it. I believe anything about them. Just get me a gun. I’ll fight with you.”
Posen, Poland
October 1943
The Reichsführer called a meeting of about a hundred officers involved in the final solution.
We met in the lobby of a hotel, here in Posen. A lot of my old colleagues were present—friends and enemies. Among the group, Blobel, Ohlendorf, Eichmann, Hoess.
In the old days I would be right at Heydrich’s side, notebook in hand. Alas, Kaltenbrunner didn’t want me that close to him. The ogre sat to one side of Himmler, listening. I sat somewhat at the rear of the room. More and more, I find a need for large doses of cognac to get through the day. I also find my mind less able to concentrate on important matters. Long noted for my detail work, I know I am becoming forgetful, sloppy.
Blobel was bragging about his work at Babi Yar. All the bodies (so he claimed) had been dug up and burned. Vast pyres of railroad ties soaked with gasoline had been used to, as someone put it, “burn the evidence.”
But why? I wonder to myself. Why bother?
Blobel reported that over 100,000 corpses had been disposed of. Then Eichman did some boasting about his trains. Hoess talked, modestly and quietly, about the functioning of Auschwitz.
Himmler kept asking if these things were being done “secretly.” He seemed more concerned than ever that the outside world not know of our work of the past few years. And yet, when one officer suggested we halt the exterminations so that Jewish labor could be used, he was silenced at once—by Reichsführer Himmler himself.
It was stuffy and hot in the hotel lobby. Most of us were weary. We wondered why Himmler had called us together.
Someone else—possibly Globocnik—requested a dozen Iron Crosses for his men, for their heroic work in ridding eastern Europe of Jews, Himmler liked the notion. He had already given out numerous decorations for officers involved in the crushing of the Warsaw rebellion.
More business was discussed. Blobel, sitting with Ohlendorf not far from me, nudged the latter in the ribs and said, loud enough for me to hear, “Silence from the Great Dorf.”
“Maybe he’s turned yellow,” Ohlendorf said. But he nodded at me. A very polite, educated fellow. He freely speaks about his killing of ninety thousand Jews in the Odessa area.
Suddenly—out of the blue—Himmler asked, “May I ask that all of you submit suggestions on the eventual dismantling of the camps?”
“Dismantling?” asked Blobel.
“Yes,” the Reichsführer said. “Our job is all but done. I … I am not suggesting Germany will be defeated, of course. But the evidence, the remains will lead to misunderstandings.”
“I don’t think so, sir,” I said. My voice was emboldened by the half-bottle of brandy I’d consumed.
“Dorf? Ah, our resident semanticist.” Himmler smiled at me.
“Perhaps we should let the camps and the furnaces stand,” I said, “as a fitting memorial to our great work.” The alcohol loosened my tongue. “Perhaps we should tell the world how we achieved—”
Blobel grabbed my arm. “Shut up, Dorf.”
They all looked away from me. It was odd. I noticed that a small recording machine was on the table and was operating.
Himmler ignored my interruption, and began to speak again. “I must talk to you frankly about a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly and yet we will never talk of it publicly. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race.”
Obviously it had been on his mind a long time.
“It is one of the things it is easy to talk about,” Himmler rambled on. His tiny eyes seemed to vanish behind the pince-nez. “The Jewish race is being exterminated, and it is quite clear it is in our program, elimination of the Jews. And we are doing it, exterminating them.”
In a way, it was refreshing. After all the wordplay, the euphemisms, the code words (many of which I created), it was almost exhilarating, cleansing, to hear our leader come out with it. And still the recording apparatus spun.
He went on to be critical of those Germans who knew “a good Jew” or who would ask that a Jew be spared. “Not one of those who talk this way has witnessed it,” he said, “not one of them has been through it. Most of you know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time to have remained decent men, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”
What his speech meant to him personally, or to us, I am not sure. I am certain that the annihilation process will be speeded up. But his insistence on secrecy, on the possibility of a plan for dismantling the death camps, bothers me.
I stumbled to my feet and asked to be heard. There was such total silence in the room, from these officers who had murdered—four million souls? five?—that I was able to command their attention.
“Permit me to say, Reichsführer,” I said, “that if our work is truly that noble, we should advertise it to the world.”
“Quiet, you damn fool,” Blobel growled.
“I believe the major misunderstands me,” Himmler said.
“If I may, sir,” I went on. “The Führer has pointed out many times that we are performing a service for western civilization, for Christianity. We are defending the west against Bolshevism. As for Jews, even our great religious figure Luther saw them as menaces.”
“Oh, I quite agree, Major,” the Reichsführer said. “But others will not see our aims as clearly. And the Jews will lie about us.”
“Let them,” I said. “Let them. Those who are left. But I say we should flood the world with film, photographs, affidavits, lists of the dead, testimony. Let us build working models of Hoess’ Auschwitz, let us tell the world every last detail about our heroic deeds. And let us insist to all that what we did to the Jews was a moral and racial necessity! Surely the western Allies will appreciate that.”
I seemed to have transfixed them. I could see the sweaty, hot faces staring at me in that dismal hotel lobby.
“Yes,” I went on, “let us maintain that we have committed no crime, but have merely followed the imperatives of European history. Eminent philosophers and churchmen can be called upon to support our case. I’m a lawyer, you know. I understand these things.
“No shame, gentlemen, no deceptions, no apologies for dead Jews, or excuses about spies, or disease or sabotage. We must make clear to the world that we stand between civilization and the Jewish plot to destroy our world, to pollute the race, to dominate us. We, we alone, have been men enough to accept their challenge. Why hide it? Why keep it a secret? Why invent excuses?”
I noticed their cold stares. Himmler was frozen.
“We have to convince the world—friend and foe alike—that the Jews forced this war on themselves … that we, we alone … we stood … we stand between the survival of … of …”
My voice dwindled into silence. They sat, all of them, looking at me as if I were a diseased dog.
Finally Himmler broke the silence. “Major Dorf has a point, I suspect. The details of our future attitudes toward our work can be the subject of another meeting. What is important is that we feel in our hearts that we have fulfilled this task with love for our own people, and that we have not in the process been damaged in our inner souls.”
I got up to speak again, but Blobel and Ohlendorf this time grabbed me, each by an arm, and led me to the corridor, thence up the stairs of the dingy hotel to my room. There were Polish whores, some of them quite beautiful, available for all of us, but I wanted only my cognac bottle.
“You fucking idiot,” Blobel said.
I could hear Himmler’s prim, small voice, still addressing his men. “We have remained decent, loving men, and for that we may be proud …”
Vanya, the prisoner who had not trusted me, soon became my friend. He managed to get me work in the cobbler’s shop, where, it was agreed, the revolt would begin. As yet we had not a single gun.
Before we were marched off to work that morning, I remember Barski telling us, in the dark barracks, “Do it in such a way that they don’t make a sound.”
A half-dozen of us carried small hatchets jammed into our belts.
We opened the shoemaker’s workshop. Vanya began to replace heels.
I kneeled in a corner and began to polish the black boots of the SS officers.
About an hour after we had opened, a young SS lieutenant came in. He carried a Luger in a holster in his belt.
“My boots ready?” he asked Vanya.
“Yes sir. You can try them on, if you wish.”
The officer sat on one of those low stools one finds in boot shops and waited. He saw me, kneeling, polishing. “Who’s that?”
“New prisoner, sir.”
There was a fleeting moment of suspicion on his face. Then he decided he had nothing to fear. I was gaunt, bruised, dressed in prison rags.
Vanya yanked at the officer’s boots, as he sat on the lower part of the stool. He got the new boot on. I got up with the pair I had been polishing and carried them to the shelf behind the stool.
I placed them on the shelf over the name of their owner. Something must have warned the lieutenant.
He spun around, and as he did, I smashed his skull with the hatchet. It was odd. He did not have time to reach for his gun, or make a sound. I hit him so hard that his brains spattered Vanya, who was several feet away.
Vanya yanked the Luger from his belt. We dragged the body into a closet, cleaned up the blood and brains.
About ten minutes later an SS captain entered. He, too, was looking for a new pair of boots. I did not even give him a chance to say good morning. From behind the door, I leaped at him and killed him with one blow of the hatchet. He wavered, staggered, seemed reluctant to die. I hit him a second time.
This time I took his pistol. We dragged him into the closet also.
Coinciding with these actions, other men in Barski’s unit killed Germans in the tailoring shop, the cabinetmaker’s, and the barber shop. We were very lucky. The soldiers had dribbled in, alone or in pairs, and were cut down before they could sound a warning.
Finally, Barski and a small party, armed now with handguns, raced into the weapons room, killed a half-dozen guards, and unlocked the gun rack. We met them there and loaded up with guns and ammunition.
By now almost a hundred prisoners had gathered in the barracks area.
Barski distributed guns to the men. For the women, there were hatchets, broom-handles, shovels. We would kill any way we could.
An alarm had been sounded somewhere.
The Klaxon drew guards from their quarters—we could see the Germans and their Ukrainian auxiliaries running out, armed, confused, shouting commands.
We took cover behind the barracks.
Barski assigned me to command a group of about twelve men, some armed, some willing to fight and die with shovels and rakes in their hands.
A squad of SS enlisted men came charging down the main street in the barracks area, and I gave the command to fire. We killed them all—seven or eight. The other units held back, not so ready to take us on.
It was Barski’s plan to assault the camp arsenal before we fled, arming our entire party, and truning us into what amounted to a small army.
Several units raced forward, holding close to the sides of buildings, trying to reach the arsenal. But as we approached, a machine gun on top of the camp water tower opened up, and scores of us were cut down.
Barski stopped the squad leaders behind the camp mess hall.
“Useless,” he said. “We’ve got to forget about the arsenal. To the gate.”
By now we had been joined by a mob—almost six hundred Jews, eager for freedom, willing to face the German guns, to race for the gates unarmed rather than submit to Sobibor’s gas chambers.
I followed Barski. Vanya led another group. From behind the cover of water barrels and sheds, we opened fire on the guards at the central gate and killed them all.
A mad rush followed. All six hundred Jews raced for the exit. Some threw stones at the guards, tried to blind them with sand.
I could hear Barski screaming at them not to run to their left—the land there was laced with mines, and there was a double strand of barbed wire to cut through. It was a dreadful sight. The land mines began to explode; dozens were blown apart.
Barski led us to a passageway behind the officers’ barracks, where we knew the earth had not been mined. Shots began to crack around us from the barracks. But Barski was right. The field was not only free of mines, but the barbed wire was thin, and we climbed over it.
Bullets kept cracking around us. Men fell. Women stumbled. I thought of Helena dying in the forest. And I kept running. A hundred meters … two hundred meters …
In the evening, we stopped beside a stream.
There was just a handful of us in our party. But we hoped others had made it safely out of the death camp.
A girl named Luba, a Red Army auxiliary, staggered into our midst at dusk. She was covered with blood, wounded in the arm and hand. She sat down and wept for a long time before she could tell her story.
Yes, six hundred Jews had fled to the gates. Four hundred, most of them without guns, actually made it to the woods and meadows outside the camp. But more than half of these were killed by landmines, pursuing SS and police, aircraft. Several thousand Fascists were sent in pursuit of the escapees from Sobibor. And, we learned later, Polish Fascist groups in the forest finished off those who escaped the SS. An old story to me.
There were about sixty of us with Barski. We were better armed, trained, tougher. We would try to reach a Soviet partisan brigade.
Years later I learned that we had killed ten SS men and thirty-eight Ukrainians. Another forty Ukrainian guards fled rather than be called to account by the Germans. And two days after our breakout, Himmler ordered Sobibor destroyed. We had made the bastard uneasy, thrown a scare into the great murderer.
Barski said that he and his comrades would head east and try to find a Red Army unit. There was a report that the Russians were about to recapture Kiev. Barski wanted to be part of the action.
Kiev. I thought of Helena and how we had stolen bread, hidden from the Germans. How Hans Helms had betrayed us and then been killed. And how we had run away from the procession of doomed Jews, and from afar seen the massacre at Babi Yar.
The hole in my insides began to eat at me, like an acid, a slow fire. I wanted her to be with me again, sharing crude meals, sleeping with me in haylofts, barns. But I would never see her again. I doubted now that I could love again, ever give myself to a woman.
Barski invited me to join them, but I said I wanted to travel alone. He warned me that I’d be in danger of capture, that by heading west I was moving toward German lines. I said I didn’t care. If I died, I died, and besides they hadn’t gotten me yet.
“Good luck, kid,” he said. And he embraced me.
“Can I keep a gun?” I asked.
“Sure. You’ve earned it.”
I walked off, following the stream, seeing Helena’s face in every tree, every leaf.
My brother Karl did not survive another winter. He had been transported to Auschwitz with a trainload of other Theresienstadt prisoners, marked for gassing.
Somehow—perhaps the word had gotten out that he was a gifted artist, and might be used—he was spared immediate death.
That he lived as long as he did was probably due to the kindness of a man named Hirsch Weinberg, who told me of Karl’s last days. This was the same Weinberg who had been a tailor with Karl at Buchenwald, five years earlier, after the arrests that followed Kristallnacht.
One day Weinberg noticed this tall, gaunt man, hiding his hands under his tunic. He studied the face and recognized him.
“I know you,” Weinburg said. “Weiss … the artist …”
They were in the same barracks, and Weinberg looked after him, tried to find work for him, sneaked bits of bread to him.
“Weiss, don’t you remember anything?” Weinberg asked. “The day we had the fight over the bread? When they hung us on the trees?”
“Sure, you remember,” the tailor went on. “You had a Christian wife. Used to smuggle letters in to you.”
Karl nodded.
Weinberg brought him up to date. A lot of news had seeped into the camp. The Red Army had entered White Russia. Although Jews from all over Europe were still being sent to Auschwitz, something was in the wind. There had been a lull in extermination selections. Hoess was said to be in trouble with his bosses.
Oh, there was all kinds of good news. Italy had declared war on the Germans; Smolensk was in Russian hands; the Allied invasion was imminent …
Karl’s voice was lost, weak. “My father … here … mother …”
It fell to Weinberg to have to tell him that both my parents had been gassed a year before. They were among the two million victims who had fed the furnaces. Weinberg had met my father once; he had liked him, as had everyone.
Karl could not cry. He listened, nodded, asked for water.
(How strange. I, too, had difficulty crying for a long time after Helena died. What happened to us? Did the evil of our persecutors, their lack of humanity, infect us?)
Then Weinberg saw Karl’s hands. “My God. What they did to them!”
He studied the gnarled, broken claws, stroked them.
“Punished,” Karl said. “For drawings.”
“Listen, Weiss, we’ve come this far. Hang on. We’ll be free someday.”
“Paper,” Karl said. “Pencil … charcoal …”
Weinberg went looking through the barracks and found a large piece of gray cardboard, and a chunk of charcoal from the stove. He propped Karl up in bed and gave them to him.
Karl’s ruined hand could barely clutch the charcoal. He smiled when he succeeded, asked Weinberg to hold the cardboard steady.
Then he proceeded to draw, in great sweeping lines.:
I have seen the picture. Inga has it. I’m not sure what it means. A swamp, darkening sky, clouds, and from the murky waters, a hand rising, reaching toward the sky.
He kept drawing, thanked Weinberg, and asked him to save his last picture.
Karl died some weeks later—typhus, cholera, no one knows. Perhaps he starved to death. Or simply lost the will to live.
His body was hauled away and burned, and his ashes mingled with those of our parents, and millions of others.
Auschwitz
November 1944
I have become a wandering emissary of the Third Reich—reporting endlessly on the final solution, keeping statistics, checking with Eichmann, Hoess, all the others involved in this staggering labor.
Last July, the Russians overran the Lublin concentration camp. The secret was out—as if it could ever have been kept. The horror pictures—so-called—have been shown to the world. We, of course, deny them, and claim that they are actually Russian atrocities perpetrated on the Poles.
But the fact that the world is slowly learning of our vast “resettlement” plans has not deterred Eichmann. He is arranging—even now, as the death-camp details are being revealed—for the mass deportation of Romania’s Jews. All through this fall of 1944, Eichmann, with my support, has kept the transports rolling, from Holland, Belgium, France. Survivors of the Krakow ghetto were dispatched to Auschwitz. Only last month, Eichmann sent 35,000 Jews from Budapest to various camps, all of these people marked for “resettlement.”
In Lublin, the Russians are hanging our staff men at the Maidanek camp. Yet Eichmann, Hoess, and many others, myself included, persist.
Himmler has sent orders out that the Auschwitz crematoria be destroyed. Gassings are all but stopped at Auschwitz. Instead we are desperately moving the inmates west, shifting them from camp to camp, a step ahead of the Russians.
All sorts of lunatic, irrational things are happening, as if no one is in charge, or knows precisely how to act in the face of our imminent defeat. Today orders came to ship only “Hungarian Jews” from Bergen-Belsen to Switzerland—orders from who? why?—and tomorrow I may receive a cable ordering that everyone in Auschwitz be marched west, to places like Gross-Rosen and Sachsenhausen.
Does Himmler really think he can hide our work?
Does he (and Kaltenbrunner and my other superiors) honestly think they can change the nature of our efforts by shifting several thousand starving ghosts?
Yet we keep them wandering all over Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, tens of thousands of these Jews, in rags, dying by the roadside, collapsing of starvation and disease. Would it not make more sense to take them out of their misery by the simple expedient of Zyklon B? Could we not then say that our measures were of a humane nature? That human endurance, the will to live, having been terminated in these Jews—and others—it is only decent to let them die as quickly and painlessly as possible? But no. My chiefs keep up this pretense that the camps never existed, that no deaths occurred there, that there were no such things as gas chambers and ovens. I sometimes feel I almost believe it myself.
Of course my personal life has suffered. I see Marta rarely, and we do not converse much, let alone share a bed. Peter is in uniform now, training with the so-called “wolf packs” who are supposed to fight to the death to save Berlin. He is a tall, handsome lad; yet, when I saw him last, I had little to say to him. Laura wept a great deal. She was hungry most of the time, and in the selfish way children have, blamed Marta and me for everything. The Bechstein is still in our apartment—damaged but playable. Marta thought of giving Laura lessons; nothing came of it.
So today I am at Auschwitz again, trying to carry out Himmler’s orders—dismantle, destroy, burn, obliterate the evidence. What a farce! But I am going through the motions.
And yet, there are times when I wonder if these efforts are as futile as they seem. For so many years, despite rumors and even direct reports, the world refused to believe that we were doing what we were. We were good at deception. And we found willing believers. Our Aesopian language worked well. Of course. The Jews. Problems. Have to be resettled, you understand.
How astonishing, the way the world turned away, took our word, trusted us!
As early as 1942, the Swedish government had word of the killing centers. Through a report from one of their diplomats, via a talkative SS officer. But the Stockholm government did not let this information out. And even the BBC, and other voices of our enemies, were cautious about uttering a word about the fate of the Jews. So perhaps I am being unduly harsh in my judgment of our SS leaders; properly handled we might well convince a vast area of public opinion that we never harmed a hair on a Jew’s head, executed only criminals, permitted the Jews to live peaceful lives in little cities of their own. Perhaps.
Not long ago, as Russian guns boomed at the I. G. Farben calcium mines outside the camp, and Soviet planes bombed us, I was on the phone with some flunky in Berlin, who kept screaming at me that the camp must be destroyed, all records burned, every last inmate evacuated, or killed, or whatever. It is all of a senselessness that defies belief.
But I have obeyed orders a long time, and I keep shouting at Josef Kramer, who has replaced Hoess, to keep at the job of blowing up the crematoria, dismantling the gas chambers.
Today Kramer laughed. He was stuffing papers into a briefcase, packing a valise—like a salesman off on a hurried trip.
“They’re all out of their fucking minds,” Kramer said. “Hide this place? Shit, it’s all on paper, all recorded. Eichmann’s already told Himmler we’ve killed six million—four million in the camps, and the rest by the Einsatzgruppen. It’s in writing, in memos, all over the place. What the hell will it mean to blow up a few buildings?”
“No more gassing!” I shouted. There was a plan to get rid of the last of the Sonderkommandos. “No more—”
“So Berlin can say we did it, they didn’t know a thing that was going on. Like that” asshole Hans Frank. When the Russians captured him, he said he never had a thing to do with it, never killed a Jew. It was us, the SS, the RSHA.”
I began—I don’t know why—to pull open the Auschwitz files and throw folders into the blazing fireplace. I ripped papers apart, heaped them high in the flames, while Kramer mocked me.
“You’d be better off burning more Jews, Dorf.”
“No. No. Berlin says move everyone west. Himmler is convinced the allies will understand. Britain and America will be sympathetic to us. It’s the Russians we have to avoid. Himmler wants to negotiate with the Americans. He—”
Kurt Dorf suddenly entered the room. My uncle saw me dashing about, pulling open desk drawers, ripping file cabinets apart, stuffing the fireplace with the documentation of Auschwitz.
My uncle watched me for a few seconds. “It’s useless, Erik. Katowice has been evacuated. The Volksturm is melting away. The Red Army will be here in a day or two.”
“And you will cheer their arrival?”
He did not answer, merely shook his head. “I understand, Erik, that there are seven tons of human hair, neatly bagged and labeled, in the warehouse. Should not someone be assigned to burn it?”
I paid no attention, but kept burning papers. Himmler may be smarter than any of us. We can play the Russians off against the allies—explain our motives—the Führer was right, we are saving the West, saving civilization. We didn’t want this war—the Jews forced it on us, and we had to make them pay.
Kramer was on another phone. I must say that although he was planning a fast departure, he was following some of my orders. He was telling his subordinates to march out the 58,000 remaining prisoners—in freezing weather—and keep them marching west.
Kurt stopped me, grabbing my arms. He is much older, but stronger. “Dear nephew,” he said, “didn’t you once tell me that we should make our glorious deeds public? That we should boast to the world how we had solved the Jewish problem? Why this change of heart? Amazing how an artillery barrage can change a man’s mind.”
I tried to tear away, but he shoved me against one of the filing cabinets I had been trying to empty. “You sneaking liar. You bloody coward. Do you honestly think you can now hide the murder of six million people?”
Kramer shouted from his phone, “I don’t fear anyone, Russians, Americans, any of them. I did a job. I obeyed orders. I am a soldier.”
“So am I,” I said.
Kurt shoved me away. “You know, you may just manage to cheat the hangman with that kind of logic. But I hope to God you don’t.”
Kramer came to my defense. “Oh, who the hell are you to lecture us? You built roads and factories with slave labor, Jews included.”
“Yes, you are right,” Kurt said. “I watched, and knew, and said or did nothing. And when I did it was much too late. I prolonged the lives of a few, when I should have talked, fled, let people know.”
I slumped into a chair. Where to? What next for me? All my despair, disgust and hatred was directed at my uncle. “I should have had you shot long ago,” I said.
Now the artillery barrage is louder. The bursts are more frequent. Distantly I hear them, the Soviet bombers.
Alt-Aussee, Austria
May 1945
Here, in a hidden valley of Austria’s Salzkammergut, many of us, in civilian clothing, are in hiding.
We try to avoid one another. Blobel is around, an embarrassment to all with his drunken blabbering. Eichmann has been seen at various places, but in the past few days has mysteriously vanished. Kaltenbrunner holds court at an old castle; he is convinced nothing will happen to us. Yet why do we hide like this?
A word about Kaltenbrunner. It is rumored that he has been desperately trying to contact the International Red Cross and prove that he acted humanely and decently to Jews. Indeed, that his main concern toward the end was to liberate the Jews of Theresienstadt.
And there are two even more astonishing stories making the rounds.
On April 19, in a farmhouse outside of Berlin, Himmler is alleged to have met with a certain Dr. Norbert Masur, a Swedish Jew and an official of the World Jewish Congress. Himmler himself requested the meeting, which was conducted in secrecy. Indeed, the Reichsführer had to excuse himself from Hitler’s birthday party to keep the appointment. (This was eleven days before the Führer took his life.)
My understanding is that Himmler was polite, cordial and rational with this Dr. Masur. He explained that the camps were all like Theresienstadt—nice little communities run by the Jews. He and his dear friend Heydrich had wanted these camps to function as proper Jewish communities all along, but were sabotaged by the Jews themselves.
As Masur questioned him about death camps, gassings, ovens, and so on, the chief calmly explained that this was “horror propaganda,” circulated by ungrateful Jews and the Russians. A burning American tank had caught fire at Buchenwald, some prisoners died, and the world press distributed photos claiming prisoners were burned by the guards. Lies, lies.
He also told Masur that the Jews were notorious spies and saboteurs and spreaders of disease, especially in Eastern Europe, and hence there was no choice but to lock them up in camps. How, Masur asked, could they commit espionage and sabotage if they were all in camps or walled-in ghettoes? Himmler did not concede the point; Jews were clever and resourceful and would find ways.
We’ve discussed this interview and find it hard to believe. Himmler has, of course, vanished. He, like us, is wandering, hiding, in civilian clothing. Evidently nothing came of his talk with Dr. Masur.
No less extraordinary is the report that Eichmann, before he wandered into Alt-Aussee and then wandered out again, invited one M. Dunand of the Red Cross to Prague, and at a rather formal dinner, backed him into a corner and explained that the Jews in Theresienstadt were better off than the poor Germans in Berlin and elsewhere.
One thing I am certain of. There will be no contrition on my part, no begging for mercy, no attempts to explain away our deeds.
I won’t be a Heydrich, asking forgiveness on his deathbed; or a Himmler, currying favor with an important Jew; or an Eichmann, making excuses to the Red Cross.
Should I be captured, I will be as courageous as the Führer, and tell my captors that I am an honorable German officer, who obeyed orders, followed my conscience, and believed deeply in the acts I was ordered to commit—because I had nothing else to believe.
There’s still hope for us. We will be able to make a logical case for Auschwitz. As a lawyer, I know that any action can be defended.
I admired Himmler far more when he spoke to us at Posen, and said that true bravery was in seeing hundreds of thousands of dead, and not flinching, being true to ourselves. Now he babbles on about “Autonomous Jewish cities.” A pity.
My thoughts often turn to Marta. She was, in a sense, the engine behind my career. When I faltered, she buoyed me up. When I had doubts, she dispelled them. We should have loved each other more. We have not slept together these last few years.
I’m drinking a great deal more than is good for me. I long, perhaps for just a day, to be with Marta and the children. Perhaps in a park, a visit to the zoo. They will say a great many terrible things about us. But they can never besmirch our basic decency, our love of family, homeland, the Führer.
[Here the Dorf diaries end.]
I have selected two letters, from among hundreds I received in the course of tracking down the fate of my family, to include in this narrative.
The first is from a man named Arthur Cassidy, a former captain in United States Army Intelligence, now an associate professor of Germanic languages at Fordham University, in New York City.
March 15, 1950
Department of Languages
Fordham University,
Bronx, N.Y.
Mr. Rudi Weiss
Kibbutz Agam
Israel
Dear Mr. Weiss:
First, let me say how much I admire your ingenuity in finding me. Although it was only five years ago that I interviewed the late Major Erik Dorf, the army has a way of losing track of these things, especially after someone returns to civilian life.
Yes, I was the intelligence officer who conducted the interview with him. Dorf was picked up for routine questioning in the town of Alt-Aussee, which was a hideout for SS officers, much in the way that Hot Springs, Arkansas, in our country is said to be a “cooling off” place for Mafia criminals.
I did not participate in his arrest, but I understand he had no identification on him, was in civilian clothing, and at first denied any complicity in the death camps, or the SS. What trapped him were the pages of a diary, sewn into his jacket lining. He later admitted that the bulk of this diary, kept over a long period of years, was in a metal box in Berlin, in his apartment.
This was not an unusual circumstance among these men. Frank, the governor of Poland, kept thirty-eight volumes of detailed notes on his activities, tried to hide them, and wept like a child when he learned they had been discovered.
Dorf was a man in his early thirties, slender, well built, nice-looking. He did seem a bit haggard and nervous at first, but as soon as he discovered I was fluent in German, he relaxed, smiled and was altogether charming and approachable. Hardly one’s notion of a man involved in mass murder.
He was one of scores of war criminals I interviewed, and I of course kept records of these conversations. They probably exist in some file somewhere, and had Dorf ever come to trial you probably would be able to track down my interview. But I will do my best to reconstruct the trend of our conversation.
We had a file on Major Erik Dorf, and his name was on numerous letters and memoranda concerning the Jews, especially when he was an aide to Reinhard Heydrich. So we knew he was no mere bystander.
Dorf kept insisting to me that he was nothing more than a glorified clerk, or courier. He claimed he knew nothing of any so-called atrocities and mass killings, but that, of course, as a fellow officer I would understand that spies and saboteurs and criminals were often put to death.
I then confronted him with several dozen photographs of the death camps, and asked him to tell me about them. You have seen these photos, I am certain, and you know what they look like—bodies stacked like cordwood, the mountains of ashes, the naked people lined up outside the chambers, the mass hangings. He professed no “direct” knowledge of them. He kept insisting that the dead were probably guerrillas, bandits, people who were marked for death by reason of their activities, not their racial origin.
Dorf said—several times, I recall—that he bore no personal malice against Jews, and in fact had once patronized a Jewish physician in Berlin, and had rather admired the man.
I then asked him if he was aware that when the last Sonderkommandos began cleaning up Auschwitz, they discovered that one of the open burning pits was coated with eighteen inches of human fat. He shook his head. All sorts of queer stories come up, he seemed to be saying.
His manner remained affable, cordial, that of an educated man—he stressed to me that he had a law degree—and he kept insisting he merely transmitted orders and that “others” made policy regarding the Jews and other minorities.
Finally, while showing him photographs of a group of dead Jewish children, evidently shot by the Einsatzgruppen and piled into a mass grave, I informed him we had testimony from twenty-four people, Germans and non-Germans, who had seen him present and acting in an official capacity at the gas chambers, at the ovens, at mass shootings. One witness even claimed to have seen Dorf himself kill a Jewish woman in the Ukraine, after being challenged by Colonel Paul Blobel. (I should say the late Blobel, since he was executed some years ago.)
At this point Dorf’s cool manner seemed to leave him. He started a lengthy explanation about how the Jews had to be destroyed since they were Christendom’s old enemies, the agents of Bolshevism, Europe’s deadliest enemies, a virus, and so on.
“The children, Major,” I said. “Why did you murder the children?”
He replied that regrettable as it may have been, if the children had been allowed to live, they would have formed the nucleus for a new attack on Germany. The Führer had explained it all. (If you are familiar with some of the testimony at Nuremberg, you’ll recall that Otto Ohlendorf, also a charming, intelligent, educated fellow, freely admitted that he ordered the annihilation of ninety thousand Jews in the Crimea and used the same reasoning.)
I informed Major Dorf that if I had my way I would gladly put a bullet in his head that moment, giving him as much chance as he gave the Jews. He turned white. But I quickly added that we were a democracy and did not do things in that manner. However, his confession and any information he could give us about his labors for the SS and the RSHA would be useful, and might serve him well when he came to trial, which I saw as inevitable.
I gave him another batch of photos to look over, and also some copies of his correspondence with people like Rudolf Hoess, Artur Nebe, Josef Kramer and other functionaries of the final solution. Then I made the mistake of going to the door and calling for a stenographer. (I had been making brief notes up to now, but I wanted a full transcipt.)
Somehow, even though he had been searched, Dorf had managed to hide—or had had sneaked to him—a cyanide capsule. He bit it, the instant I reached the door. He was dead by the time his body hit the floor. Like so many of his kind, he preferred this way out to facing up to the monstrous crimes he had committed. And yet—what a damned charming young man he was!
I am truly sorry about the fate of your family. If I can help you in any other way in your research, let me know.
Cordially,
Arthur Cassidy
A second letter bears on this story of my family, and I present it here. It is from Kurt Dorf, the uncle of Major Erik Dorf. I had less trouble finding him. He was a witness for the prosecution at Nuremberg. His name is memorialized in the Yad Vashem, as one of Europe’s “Righteous Christians.”
Bremen, Germany
July 10, 1950
My Dear Mr. Weiss:
Your informants are correct. I am the uncle of the late Major Erik Dorf of Berlin. I don’t know what I can add to your search for the fate of your late family. To say I am sorry, that I offer my condolences would be senseless. How does one apologize for a crime unprecedented?
You know of my testimony at Nuremberg. I have been vilified and condemned for it, and my work as a professional engineer curtailed. It is my hope to emigrate to the United States within the next six months. Some Jewish friends are arranging it.
Erik Dorf committed suicide on May 16, 1945, during an interrogation by U.S. Army intelligence. This was precisely a week before his chief, Himmler, committed suicide, in the identical manner, after being arrested by British authorities in Lüneburg.
On learning of my nephew’s death, on my next trip to Berlin, I called on his widow and children. Frau Dorf showed me an unsigned letter from “a comrade” saying that Erik Dorf had died a hero’s death in defense of the Reich. I could not let the matter stand, and I told them the truth—that Erik Dorf was a criminal, a mass murderer, a participant in the most appalling crime in human history. I regret to say that neither Marta Dorf nor her children accepted this, and I was told to leave—indeed, called a “traitor” by Peter Dorf, the Major’s fifteen-year-old son.
As for your father, I did know him at Auschwitz. He and a man named Lowy were members of my road-building team. You have read my testimony and you know that I made repeated efforts to save Jews from the gassings by selecting certain men and more or less sequestering them from the SS. I regret that I could not protect your father longer than I did. I suspect my nephew, with whom I had been at odds for some time, had something to do with his consignment to the chambers.
Your father appeared to me a man of great kindness and dignity and I am numb with shame and guilt that I was part of the nation that destroyed such people. That is why I have chosen to speak out and be heard. For what little consolation it is, he went to his death with courage and even, as I recall, a touch of humor. In my hazed mind, I seem to recall him joking the prisoner named Lowy as they were marched off.
No, I did not know your mother or your brother. They both seem to have been wonderful people, and again I am left with that dread, drained, defeated feeling as I look back on the destruction we visited on so many people in those nightmare years.
In my own defense—-weak as it is—I still had four hundred Jews working for me, saved from the chambers, at the time Auschwitz was liberated.
Please feel free to write to me again if I can be of help. That I am numbered among the “Righteous Christians” of Europe is an honor I am not certain I merit. But I accept it humbly. Perhaps someday we will meet in Israel.
Most truly yours,
Kurt Dorf
On May 11, 1945, I rode into Theresienstadt with a Czech brigade. Many of the soldiers were Jews. There was even a man from Helena’s street in Prague, who had known her, and known her parents. He told me they were long dead; he didn’t know the details. In turn, I told him very little about Helena. Yes, we had been married. My silence told him something about me—an odd duck, this Berliner, ex-partisan.
I still did not cry. I tried not to think of her. I had loved her too much, too intensely. In danger all the time, we had clung to one another. We had lived several lifetimes in our years together. Now she was gone. I was isolated, cold. I had trouble listening to people talk. They wore me out with their stories. There had been too much suffering, too much misery. I found that I wanted to sit alone, lapse into silences, make no attachments.
On my way back to Czechoslovakia, I wandered through Auschwitz and learned from some survivors that both my parents and my brother had died there. Of course there was no trace of them.
Later, at a camp called Gross-Rosen, I ran into this man Hirsch Weinberg, the tailor who had known Karl in Buchenwald and had seen him again when he was dying in Auschwitz. Weinberg told me about the last picture Karl ever drew. That strange, crude thing—the hand reaching out of a swamp. Weinberg told me he also had reason to believe that my sister-in-law Inga was still in the camp.
I came into Theresienstadt on a sunny spring morning. It was amazing. The town had just been liberated, Jews were still dying of hunger and disease—and the original Czech inhabitants who had been expelled by the Nazis to create the camp were moving back in, as if nothing at all had happened.
The Red Cross was there, taking care of the ill, feeding people.
And so was an organization called the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which had set up an office and appeared to be registering former prisoners. I walked down the street—it was an attractive place, despite the hideous things done to people there—and wondered if I would find Inga.
In my mind I kept keeping a list of the dead. I tried to blot it out, but the names and circumstances kept recurring, and soon I was feeling guilty that I had been lucky enough, tough enough, cunning enough, to be alive, when all of my family had been lost.
My grandparents, the Palitzes, suicides in Berlin …
My parents, gassed in Auschwitz …
My sister Anna, killed, God knows where, and for unknown reasons …
My brother Karl, dead of starvation in Auschwitz …
My Uncle Moses, shot to death in the Warsaw ghetto …
It was hard to believe that I was now twenty-seven years old, and that I had spent the last six years of my life as a wanderer. And I wondered why I had come there. Even more, where I would go.
In a muddy field outside the building marked with the Jewish Agency sign, some young boys were kicking a soccer ball. I glanced at them. I thought of the hundreds of games I’d played in, and the professional career people said I’d have, and the day they kicked me off the semi-pro team. It seemed to be another life I’d lived. On another planet, centuries before.
A stocky man in a khaki uniform came out of the Jewish Agency building and stared at me a moment. He was talking to another man, smaller, older. Were they looking at me?
I moved on. I saw the fake shops, the false bank, all the trappings of a city, with which the Nazis had foisted upon the world the notion that the Jews were living in a community of their own. This, while twelve thousand a day were gassed at Auschwitz alone, not to mention Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor.
But at some time one must close one’s mind, or at least redirect it. But how? Where did I belong? Who wanted me?
I saw Inga.
She was carrying a small boy, perhaps ten months old. He wore a coat two sizes too big for him. He was a pink little boy with Karl’s somber eyes.
“Rudi,” she said. “I hoped you would come.”
We kissed each other.
“And kiss your nephew,” she said. “He is Karl’s son. I have named him Josef, for your father. People say he looks like Karl.”
I kissed the baby’s cheek. He smelled of sour milk, like most babies. “He looks more like Churchill,” I said.
“Oh, you are the same Rudi,” she said, smiling. “Come, sit down and talk to me.”
But what could we say? She knew of Karl’s death, of my parents’ death, of Uncle Moses in the Warsaw ghetto. And she told me the truth about Anna. She had learned about Hadamar and the “mercy killings,” and she blamed herself for taking Anna there at the advice of the doctor.
“I remember the day you left Berlin,” she said. “Alone, you against the world.”
“I was lucky.”
The baby whimpered. I tickled his cheek. “Smile, Churchill. I’m your uncle.”
She told me about Karl and the artists, how the Germans tortured him, how he refused to tell them about the hidden paintings, or inform on the other artists. He was courageous to the end.
“And they’ll get away with it,” I said. “Because no one will believe a crime that big. People will say, ‘Impossible, they could not kill that many, torture that many, be so cruel.’ People will say that there are limits, that human beings stop at some point. But they didn’t stop.”
Inga said, “You can hate me if you wish. I am one of them.”
“No. I don’t hate you. I’m a blank, empty. No hate, no love, no hopes. I’ll just keep going. Like one of the Mussulmen, the walking dead in the camps.”
“No, Rudi. Not you. Never.”
I told her about Helena, and how much we had loved each other. God knows what they did with her body. I would not go back to look for it. Probably buried in some pit, burned by the Germans.
“But you had each other for a while,” Inga said, “and you loved each other.”
“Yes. I know.” I sighed, stared at her. “Where are you going?”
“Back to Germany. But I won’t stay. I won’t raise Karl’s son there. Perhaps America. And you?”
“I don’t know. I’ll wander.”
“Alone? With no money?”
“I got by for a long time.”
She asked me to come to the studio, where Karl had worked, where he had done the secret pictures that had so enraged the Germans, and that had led to his death.
We got up. There was a lot of activity in the camp—outdoor kitchens, first-aid units, people moving belongings on carts, Czech army people, the few Jews who were left, the Czech Christians moving in.
We walked the cobbled streets. I pinched my nephew’s cheek.
In the studio, I met Maria Kalova, who had worked in the studio with Karl.
She and Inga spread dozens of drawings and sketches on the tables. Karl and other men had created them. They were the truthful story of the horrors of the camp—hangings, beatings, starvation, degradation. They were the artists’ answer to the Nazis.
“Your brother was a talented man, and a good one,” Maria Kalova said. “All of the paintings will go to a museum in Prague, so the world can see them.”
“They killed him for these?” I asked.
Inga began to cry. “Rudi, if you could have seen him, with his hands smashed, those beautiful hands …”
And of course there was his last picture. The hand rising from the swamp, reaching for the sky.
I looked at the drawings, and I saw Karl and myself, as kids, playing in the street in front of Groningstrasse. Sometimes we played cowboys and Red Indians. Karl always hated to make believe he was firing a gun.
But I could not cry. I only said stupidly, “Poor Karl. Skinny, afraid. But he wasn’t afraid of them. Braver than I was. I had a gun most of the time.”
And then I had a flashing mental image of my father in his white coat, the stethoscope in his pocket. His kind, tired face at the window. He is rapping to us, signaling to us to come in for dinner. It is early fall in Berlin. Leaves are falling. Karl and I wrestle each other playfully, race for the steps to the house. I always win.
I looked at the baby, wondering what kind of life he would have. Within me, old memories stirred. A loving mother. A kind father. Brother, sister—a family who shared things, laughed, got angry, found beauty in music, joy in sport, all of us quietly admiring our harassed father, that physician always with his thoughts on an ill person, a patient lost. And all of us a bit fearful of our mother, so dignified, lovely, intelligent.
All destroyed. Burned, the ashes scattered to the winds. And how many millions of other families they had destroyed, without a sign of pity, without reason, in a monstrous outburst of murder and hate that I still did not understand. I saw it coming. I saw the irrational hate in their eyes early, and I ran. But I still cannot comprehend what motivated them.
“He looks like good boy,” I said. And choked back the first emotion I had felt in months.
“He is, Rudi.”
Inga was weeping, holding my hand. “God blessed me letting me be part of your family. I am filled with guilt and shame that I am still alive. I have no right to be.”
I shook my head. “Maybe we loved each other too much. Maybe that’s what ruined us.”
“No, Rudi. You must never believe that, or even say it.”
I said goodbye to Maria Kalova. Inga, holding her son, walked with me to the square. “Where will you go?” she asked.
“I have no idea. I’m nobody. No family, no country, no papers.”
“Come to Berlin with me and little Josef. Until you decide.”
“No. I’ll never go back there.”
She kissed me. “Goodbye, little brother.”
The coldness was still in me. I barely felt her kiss. “Goodbye, Inga,” I said. And I pointed to my nephew. “Teach him not to be afraid.”
And I walked away. There were some friends I’d made in the Czech brigade I wanted to talk to. Men who had known Helena’s family; maybe they had some advice.
Once more I passed the field where the boys were kicking the soccer ball. They were strange-looking kids, very dark, shaved heads, skinny. Their clothes were ragged. Yet a few of them knew how to play well, move the ball, head it.
I stopped to watch. As I did, the stocky man I had seen earlier came out of the doorway. He was smoking a cigar.
“Some of those kids aren’t bad,” I said to him. “Who are they?”
“Greek Jews. Their families were massacred in Salonika. A parting gift from the Germans.”
A look of anger, the old desire to kill someone in revenge, must have changed my expression. All I could think of was—where are the bastards who killed their parents? Why are they not shot? Why does the world let them get away with this?
“You’re Rudi Weiss,” the man said.
“How do you know?”
“There are no secrets in a liberated camp. Not among the Jews, anyway.” He extended a strong hand. “My name’s Levin. I’m with the Jewish Agency for Palestine. I’m an American.”
“So?”
“I know a few things about you.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you were a partisan for a long time. They say you broke out of Sobibor.”
“What else do you know?”
“Forgive me, Weiss. Your parents and your brother died in Auschwitz. Your wife was killed in the Ukraine.”
“You know a lot.”
I was vaguely annoyed with Levin. I wanted to be left alone, to make my own way, to bury the past. I started to walk away.
“Hold it, Weiss,” Levin said.
“What for?”
“You want a job?”
I smiled. “If you know so much about me, you must know I never finished high school.”
“For this job I think you’re qualified.”
He took my arm and led me closer to the wet field, around which the Greek children were kicking the ball.
“See those kids?” Levin asked. “They need a shepherd.”
“Shepherd?”
“Someone to sneak them into Palestine. There are forty of them—no parents. Someone’s got to take them. You interested?”
“I don’t speak Greek. Or Hebrew. I’m not sure I’m much of a Jew.”
Levin smiled. “You’ll do.”
I remembered Helena with her dreams of Zion, the warm sea, the farms in the hills and the desert.
“It won’t be as dangerous as the partisans, Weiss, but it won’t be a Purim party either. No guns, but plenty of action. How about it?”
I thought no more, and responded, “Why not?”
Then I dropped my knapsack and ran to the soccer field.
“We’ll get you a passport,” Levin called.
Two kids had collided, and one went down. He got up swinging. I separated them. “You want to play soccer, stop fighting,” I said. “Give me the ball.”
I started babying the ball down the field, using all the old moves, nudging it between players, passing off, heading it, directing the attack.
They raced around me, laughing, shouting in a language I could not understand.
Someone had placed two empty oil drums at the edge of the field to mark the goal. I nudged the ball to one side, feinted, and then kicked it through the space.
When I retrieved the ball and came back to the shaven-headed kids, they already knew my name. They clung to my legs, grabbed my hand, and one of them kissed me.