One day late in November of 1944 we received a visit from Hans, an Austrian comrade. This summer the resistance had arranged to get him assigned to the komando working on the train ramp. They wanted him to inform the new prisoners arriving in Auschwitz what was awaiting them in the showers. He barely escaped the gas chamber himself, because the skeptical prisoners began to question the SS men in order to corroborate the information he had given them. Having succeeded in eluding the SS, he had come, now, to visit us, cheerful and full of positive thoughts, as ever. He brought me as a present a beautiful winter coat, which I sold in April of 1945 in Rostock for a loaf of soggy bread and half a box of margarine.
As so often happened, we got into a discussion on the future of the camp. Hans had brought us interesting news. The Red Army had crossed the Prussian frontier and the fighting was taking place on German soil.
“That’s why they stopped the gassing in Auschwitz,” Hans said. “They are afraid that the Germans may suffer the same fate. It seems that the Russians have given them an ultimatum about that.”
Now I understood why Mengele had not sent those decrepit old people to the gas. The rulers of the world were afraid, those same rulers who, as early as July 1941, had painted signs in big white letters on their trucks: “Berlin-Moscow.” Although the war was not yet over, they were being forced to yield and to make an attempt to placate the winners.
It was in the waning hours of a short fall day that Orli came into the infirmary. “Have somebody stand at the gate and guard the entrance,” she said. “I will give you a copy of the latest issue of Goebbels’s newspaper, Das Reich, in which a speech by Ilya Ehrenburg is reprinted.”
At first I thought that I must have heard it wrong. How could that be? Goebbels printing an article by Ehrenburg? Maybe he had printed it as a provocation.
“Read it,” Orli insisted. “You will see.”
“Wehe, Deutschlandl” “Woe unto Germany!” That was the title of the article. The article was prefaced with a few words by the editor and ran as follows: “An article appeared in the Russian newspaper, addressed to the Russian soldiers who had entered German territory. We are reprinting it in its entirety in order to show you what is awaiting us in case we lose the war. We are printing it to warn our soldiers and to arouse their manhood in the fight against the Bolsheviks. For us there is no turning back!”
Following this preface came Ilya Ehrenburg’s article. I quote the article from memory, but I have read it so many times that I can recall the sense of it fairly accurately:
Soldiers of the Red Army [wrote Ehrenburg], you have entered the territory of Hitler’s Germany You are on the road to Berlin. Take revenge for everything, for what you the people of the Soviet Union have suffered and for what the other occupied peoples have had to suffer. Take revenge for all the suffering inflicted by the Germans.
In case pity for the Germans should creep into your hearts, remind yourselves of your mothers dragged by the hair, your sisters who were raped by the brutes, children whose heads were split open on lamp posts. Be merciless avengers! Quaff the sweet wine of revenge and let it fill your hearts.
Our own hearts now filled with the yearning for revenge, revenge for our wasted young lives, for the death of our relatives, for the red sky, for the acrid stench of burning flesh that was with us day and night.
When we switched on the electric light we saw that Orli was no longer among us. She had slipped quietly into the infirmary, and now she was sitting in the corner, with her head on the table, crying in despair.
“Understand,” she said as we approached her, “those are my people. It is my nation that is fallen into misfortune. My brothers are there, my parents and my sisters.”
We did not say a word.
“My soul is being torn apart,” she said finally.