One law of nature, confirmed by science, as well as by clairvoyants, says that general awfulness has no day off. Or to put it in other words, when something bad happens to you, you can be sure it doesn’t come alone, and that after it others will follow along like ducklings after their mother. In our case, it seems that no minor role was played by the collapse of our “Special Site’s” prestige as something that had firmly supported the doctrine of the strictly guarded secret as a major element in national security. The situation was also influenced by a solitary bomb, dropped by an absentminded American, whether by accident or on purpose we don’t know, that fell about twenty meters or so from the machinists’ workshop, broke the windows of the surrounding barracks and, as a final strategic-military effect, made a hole in the sea. But the respective institutions also saw in this bomb evil premonitions and treason, which imperatively required that we purge our collective of poisonous weeds.
This is how we came to the lining up of the ethnic Poles—almost half the camp personnel—at the square in front of the commandant’s, while the other—the Soviet half—remained in the workshops to maintain production. And as far as I was, at least on paper, a pure-blooded Pole, I found myself among those lined-up, and to my surprise, even Oberlieutenant Brückner didn’t know the meaning and purpose of the telephone-transmitted order.
And so, we were standing in the square, with the Radish on the small wooden veranda in front of the office, as if he were going to receive a victory parade. He frequently looked at his watch, himself anxious by the delay of the parade, though pretending to be well informed and highly confident by asking strictly from time to time for silence. Of course, the gossip information agency, the one that every well-equipped camp possesses as well as the whispers crawling between the lines, had immediately set itself in motion and been informing interested parties that we would probably be released, a reward for labor honestly dedicated to the Reich.
Nothing could be further from the truth, because after a half-hour’s eager anticipation, we were still standing there when two furious SS bosses stormed in and with an abruptness unsuitable to his rank handed over a written order to our completely confused commandant. Hurt to the bottom of his sensitive soul, Oberlieutenant Brückner, with a hollow voice, ordered us to count ourselves and after we did, the two cocky SS men passed quickly by the lines and harshly pulled out every tenth man to stand in front of the row.
You’ll die laughing, but one of the tenths happened to be me—as they say, if Yahweh, glory to His name, has given orders for you to get into trouble, there’s no way you can avoid it.
The whole business was about some big boss of theirs who’d been shot in the streets of Warsaw, and now they were looking for a hundred Poles as hostages. You know how it goes: if the assassins do not surrender themselves by this or that date, this or that time, on the dot, the hundred Poles will be shot in legal and fully understandable retribution. Now, I ask you, in view of the existing situation, which was better—to remain a Pole or admit I was a Jew? The question hardly has an answer, because in the one case, as well as in the other, I’d end up, as the saying goes, pushing up daisies, but I personally preferred to be a Polish Jew—a sweeper in the New York subway. My boss, Oberlieutenant Immanuel-Johannes Brückner, to his credit, tried to get me out with the reasoning that he needed me in the office and other things like that, but nothing helped, and New York, unfortunately, was a pure adolescent dream, too far away from the dim reality of Oranienburg.
In this way a hundred of us turned up squeezed like match-sticks into the already overcrowded common cells of some prison—a sinister building of unpainted brick somewhere in Berlin. In it there were Jews and Gypsies, some Montenegrins quietly singing sad songs, some homosexuals, and other beings harmful to the Reich.
Since we were a hundred Poles, and the kitchen hadn’t planned for those who had poured right out of the blue onto the heads of the prison management, they forgot to feed us, maybe with the hope that it wouldn’t be necessary. And I, exhausted from the hard, worry-filled day, tortured by the journey in the trucks, in which we were packed so tightly that we couldn’t even sit down, soon fell asleep folded up on the floor—there weren’t even any cots, let alone that blessed iron bed in the office.
And here’s what happened, my dear brother: I dreamed I was in my hometown Kolodetz, at a Jewish wedding. I was playing the violin, and the rabbi Shmuel Ben-David was circumcising giggling Jewish boys. We were all happy and singing Jewish songs, our good neighbors, dressed in caftans tailored by my father, were clapping their hands in rhythm, and in the middle of the circle of people the old postman Avramchik and Esther Katz were dancing the cracowviak, stomping with heavy shoes.
It turned out that the stomping wasn’t from the shoes, but from guards who were loudly banging their keys against the opening cell doors and shouting “Juden raus!” which means “Jews out!” And I, the idiot of all idiots, still sleepy and confused, completely forgot that I was the Polish pan Heinrich Bjegalski, a doorman at the Lvov ophthalmology clinic, and dazed by the merry Galician wedding, went out with the other Jews. Along the endless corridor, lit up by naked electric bulbs, sleepy and frightened people crowded together from the neighboring cells, and I was maybe the only one without a yellow cloth star on my breast. Later I figured out what was happening and wanted to explain the apparent misunderstanding, and even showed the identification papers proving me a legitimate Pole, but the doors were closing, let’s go, let’s go, don’t dawdle! In such cases no documents help, I had admitted to being a Jew by merely going out of the cell, and the guards apparently shared the Soviet state accuser Vishinksi’s view that admitting guilt—in any circumstances, even under pressure—is the queen of evidence.
It was useless to resist, because it has been said and seven times seven proven: to be a Jew is a life sentence without the right of appeal!
Again crammed into the horse wagon, this time I learned that they were deporting us to the camp Flossenbürg, Oberpfalz, where a typhoid epidemic was raging, and where we were going to be asked to take care of our dead brothers, very touching! At least this is how the problem was explained to us by the transportation boss, some Gmppenstumführer, so there wouldn’t be panic and attempts to escape. In other words, we were on our way to certain death in the typhoid apocalypse of Flossenbürg and there was no doubt about it.
And now, brother, let me remind you again that the human being is a helpless little ant in the powerful and irreversible games of fortune and to it—the ant—it’s not given to judge if the trouble afflicting him is God’s punishment or His secret caress. Because that same night the remaining ninety-nine Polish hostages, brought from Special Site A-27, were shot dead, as I learned after the war. The hundredth of them, according to the diligently compiled list, remained unfound, and this was me, Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld, at that moment traveling to distant Oberpfalz.