part0015

WHEN THE TRAINS stopped on the tracks that first night to let other trains pass, we could hear shooting. We hoped the partisans were engaging the Germans, but we had no way of knowing what was happening on the other side of the thin wooden planks of the cattle car. We could hear additional cars being attached and added to our train in the final segment of our transfer. We struggled to make space for ourselves in the cramped car. I was comforted by the fact that I was with my father and my uncle. Once again, we moved down the tracks toward our ultimate destination. We did not know where the tracks ended or how long we would remain confined in the car with nothing to eat, nothing to drink. Day turned to night. Night turned to day. And the train rolled ever onward.

Early Sunday morning, before sunrise, the train decelerated and stopped. We saw, by looking through slats in the tiny windows, prisoners in what appeared to be striped pajamas. From my boyhood imagination, it looked to be some kind of insane asylum. We could not see signs indicating the name of the town or the station where we had arrived, but there was a platform. Suddenly, the car doors were flung open. We were met by hostile German soldiers who were holding back snarling and barking attack dogs who lunged at us as we descended from the train. The German soldiers, in response, pulled hard on the leashes to counteract the dogs’ strength. Those powerful dogs were trained to attack, kill, and intimidate.

As the doors opened, the bodies of the dead leaders of the Jewish community of Starachowice tumbled out of the first car. The Germans did not know about the revenge killing taken against these former community leaders. Some thirty-six hours after leaving Starachowice, and traveling some one hundred forty miles, we had arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was a hot summer day. We were exhausted, physically and emotionally. Our legs were cramped and we were famished, having been on the train from Friday to Sunday, without food or water, and only a bucket for a toilet.

Because we were a transport of prisoners from a work camp, there were allegedly no elderly or children in our group, and selections would have presumably already taken place in Starachowice prior to our transport. We therefore faced no selection process at the arrival platforms. Perhaps too the early hour of our arrival on a Sunday helped ensure our entry into the camp without a selection. This small miracle, of not having to face a selection, again allowed me to survive. Surely a scrawny boy, shy of his fourteenth birthday, would have been sent to the left, to die in the gas chamber.

My father had concealed two gold coins in his pocket. Each American five-dollar gold coin was worth about one hundred dollars at the time, a great deal of money. He gave one to his friend, Godel, Kiva’s father, to hold under his tongue. He hid one in his own mouth. The men were taking a huge risk. Truly, their lives were at stake, for anyone caught attempting to bring anything into the camp would have been shot. My father had to take a chance though; anything of value could be used in exchange for food, or for a better work assignment. We were two fathers and two sons. Kiva and I had already become like brothers from our time at Tartak, looking out for one another, but now at Auschwitz we would need to rely upon each other even more. Our survival depended on it.

We were disoriented upon arrival: exhausted, hungry, thirsty, frightened. Guards beat us as we exited the train, and they forced us to march to the barracks to be processed. First the guards ordered us to undress. Then they commanded us to have our heads shaved. Next they ordered us to the showers. We had heard rumors, and were frightened as they forced us into the shower room. We were thankful when water sprayed from the showerheads, and not gas. After the shower, we were doused with DDT to prevent the spread of lice. The poison burned our skin, but we were thankful to be alive, for having survived the train journey. They gave each of us a uniform that resembled the striped pajamas that we saw being worn by the other prisoners: pants, a shirt, and a cap. We kept our essential manashke and spoon with us, brought from Tartak.

At Tartak, we wore our own clothes. Now we were forced to wear a uniform, likely already worn by someone whose ashes had since floated skyward through the chimneys from which smoke seemed to emanate ceaselessly. Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, we knew that everything here would be different – harder, scarier, riskier. We had heard whispers about Auschwitz and Birkenau and the dreaded gas chambers. We could see them now with our own eyes, not only the chimneys but the ashes as well. We could see the spirals of ashes ascending towards heaven. Ashes to ashes, I thought, dust to dust, but this was not how it was intended. We could no longer delude ourselves about “rumors.”

When I registered at Auschwitz, I gave my birth year as 1928 in order to make myself older.

Some boys from the Starachowice camps were somehow able to stay with their mothers, but I remained with my father and uncle in the men’s camp, where work was more brutal and selections more frequent.

My father, my uncle Ben Zion, and I were together when we received our tattoos, so our numbers were sequential: My uncle’s was A18804, mine was A18805 and my father’s was A18806. Ali Rosenberg, also a prisoner, tattooed our numbers on our left arms, as was done with all the prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I peered into his face as he scratched out the tattoo on my arm. Ali dipped a needle into the ink before pricking it into our flesh. The needle stung, but we had learned to endure pain without wincing. The tattoo was but one more act to dehumanize the Jews and the other prisoners. We became mere numbers, interchangeable, fungible, like livestock. The circumstance of our sequential numbers would prove helpful to me in the future. After the tattooing, we were no longer called by our names, only by our numbers. We were nothing more than a commodity to the Germans. Only prisoners of Auschwitz were tattooed with numbers. Prisoners from Majdanek had tattoos with the letters “KL” (koncentracion lager ) meaning concentration camp, but they did not have tattooed numbers.

After a day of intake at Auschwitz-Birkenau, on August 2, 1944, the guards ordered us to “C Camp” (the Gypsy camp), where we were assigned to our bunks for the night. The chimneys of the gas chambers were in direct view of the barrack. We heard a lot of commotion outside but did not know what was going on. That night some 3,000 Gypsies were gassed and their bodies were burned. I could smell the burning flesh all throughout the night. It was a nauseating, unforgettable smell that coated the inside of my nose and throat. The Gypsies were taken away to make room for our transport. They had outlived their usefulness for the Germans, and now, with our arrival, we would replace the weak.

Would we meet the same fate as the Gypsies? How much time did we have before they replaced us with another recently arrived transport? How could human beings be so barbaric? How do the perpetrators of these atrocities go home at night and have normal interactions with family and friends, knowing what they had done? What has happened to the collective conscience of these people? These were questions of mine, then and now.

The next morning, we experienced our first of many prisoner appels, ( roll calls), at Auschwitz-Birkenau. We were assigned jobs based upon individual skills and the Germans’ needs. My father was sent to Buna (Monowitz), also known as Auschwitz III, a camp that housed rubber factories. Very few survived Buna. When my father was selected, we did not expect to see him again. At thirty-nine years old, he had lost his youngest son, been separated from his wife, lost his home, his business, all his possessions, his freedom, and his dignity. Before he was sent away, my father handed me the gold coin that he had sneaked into this wretched place. I was to share it with Kiva, if necessary. He was a fair man, and sharing the coin with Kiva was my father’s way of thanking Godel for risking his own life to also smuggle one of the gold coins into the camp. We were all in this together, and we did what we could to look out for one another – our friends, our family, our community.

There was little time for a proper goodbye. I hoped to see my father again, and the thought of being reunited with my family at some future date helped me cope. I couldn’t be sure though. It had been so long without news from anyone from our town who was on that ill-fated train the day of the liquidation, and I knew deep inside me that those souls were already gone from this world. I did not want to acknowledge that explicitly, but that thought remained lodged somewhere in my subconscious. So when my father was separated from us and sent to Buna, I swore to keep him always in my heart and to find a glint of optimism deep inside myself.

My uncle was selected for Commando, a fairly desirable job. Kiva and I were among the youngest in camp and initially were not given jobs. C Camp was mostly a transfer camp. Trains arrived at night; men were brought to C Camp where there was a selection process. The strong were sent to labor in one of the forty Auschwitz sub-camps. Those the Nazis deemed unfit for work were sent to their deaths.

The summer of 1944 was a particularly treacherous time to be a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Nazi killings escalated to a record 9,000 per day, a rate exceeding the capacity of the crematoria. Slave laborers were forced to dig six huge pits around the area of the crematoria to accommodate the large number of bodies. The charred bodies and ashes remain buried in the mass graves.

Only later we would come to learn that while the killings at Auschwitz-Birkenau were being stepped up, Russian troops had liberated a Nazi concentration camp in Poland in July of 1944. The camp, Majdanek, was just four kilometers from the city center of Lublin, not located in a remote forest where atrocities were easily hidden, as at Treblinka and Auschwitz. We had met some former prisoners of Majdanek when they arrived in Starachowice. They had already seen firsthand what the death camps were like. They were the prisoners who had verified the truth of the gas chambers and reported what was really happening in concentration camps and killing centers. To them, the labor camps in Starachowice must have been a welcome improvement. Despite beatings, and some selections, at least there were no gas chambers. Majdanek, originally a POW camp, was visible from the main road and was surrounded by small villages. Thousands perished at Majdanek, many from the Lublin region, as well as from Warsaw. The Nazis celebrated Aktion Erntefest (“Operation Harvest Festival”) in November 1943, when they massacred some 42,000 prisoners. This atrocity included the infamous machine gunning of 18,000 Jews in one day at Majdanek camp itself. The Germans forced the prisoners to dig ditches, and to line up, one hundred to a row, to be gunned down. The next hundred were forced to lie down on the fresh corpses for their turn to be killed. This continued from morning to night, line after line of one hundred people at a time. Classical music blared from speakers, so that the neighboring townspeople would not hear the gunfire or the victims’ screams. The other 24,000 victims were killed at other camps in the Lublin district, for example at Poniatowa and Trawniki, where the dead were actually burned on open grills, not in crematoria with smoke stacks. Surely, the citizens must have suspected something sinister was occurring. Surely the townspeople saw that thousands entered the gates at Majdanek, yet none emerged. The smoke stacks were visible for all to see, and the endless chain of smoke that emanated from those stacks would certainly have spread the unmistakable scent of burning flesh. It was said that ash fell on the city for at least a week after the Aktion Erntefest . None could feign ignorance of the massacres occurring all around them.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was unlike Majdanek, as Auschwitz-Birkenau was more secluded, despite its massive scale. Oswiecim, the town from which Auschwitz takes its name, along with many surrounding villages, were razed and the inhabitants forced to relocate before Auschwitz-Birkenau began to be used as a labor and death camp. Birkenau, known as Auschwitz II, was a death camp of 175 acres. The camp, originally designed to house 125,000 prisoners, was expanded to a capacity of 200,000. Toward the end of the war, it was used as a camp to assemble prisoners together before they were transferred to labor camps, as the Germans were struggling to stave off Allied forces closing in on them. Although there were prisoners of war from the Soviet Union and from other countries who perished in Auschwitz’s complex of sub-camps, the overwhelming majority of all victims died in Birkenau. We were living in a cemetery, but soon we too could be among the buried, burned, and forgotten.

We were constantly surrounded by death at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but saw many contradictions within the Nazi process. The Germans venerated classical music. Many of Europe’s most accomplished Jewish musicians and artists wound up in Auschwitz, destined for extermination. Birkenau’s orchestra comprised some of Europe’s finest musicians, who were forced to play for the prisoners as they exited the camp in the morning and returned in the evening. The musicians had their own barracks, and in the beginning, before we had jobs, Kiva and I would listen to their daily practice. By stealing ourselves away in the musicians’ barracks, we kept ourselves occupied and out of sight of the German guards. One had to stay useful in Auschwitz-Birkenau; otherwise, the gas chambers awaited. Without assigned jobs, we did what we could to stay undetected. Sometimes that meant hiding in the barrack playing cards; other times it was listening to the musicians rehearse.

We remained in C Camp barracks from our arrival in July until October. I was like a tiger in a cage, restless. No one could be trusted, not even those in one’s own barrack. It was important to have a buddy, and I had Kiva. We looked after one another. In many ways, our lives were parallel. We shared so much and seemed to have comparable good luck. We were childhood friends who had each escaped the liquidation of the Wierzbnik Ghetto, and now we had survived Tartak and the transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau. We were bonded as few human beings are in life.

During the summer of 1944, the Lodz ghetto was liquidated, and 60,000 Jews were transported to Birkenau. Others were sent from the Lodz ghetto to Chelmno. Lodz was the last remaining Jewish ghetto in Poland. Time was running out for the Jews, as Hitler’s “Final Solution” accelerated. The Third Reich had gained power and territory, and it seemed that the Russians, English, and Americans might not advance in time to save those of us who remained. We had very little news from the outside world, but rumors swirled within the camp. One of the last transports carrying Hungarians also arrived in late summer 1944.

Does anyone know we are here? Does anyone care? Why don’t the Allies bomb the train lines so the transports to the camps can stop? Will we be saved in time? Do not give up hope, do not give up hope, do not give up. My inner dialogue was filled with questions and, always, with mantras of hope and survival.

Sundays were special. There was no work, and we were sometimes given pea soup and bologna. We tested the soup’s quality by sticking our spoons upright in the bowl. If the spoon fell over, the soup was mostly liquid, but if the spoon stood straight up, there was more substance to it. We savored every bite of the disgusting nutrition. Food was brought to our barracks in big pots carried by prisoners. This method of distribution reduced the risk of someone sneaking in line for more than one portion.

Each prisoner had a manashke , a small container for food. We guarded the manashke as a precious possession. Without it, one could not eat the meager portions of soup allotted us. I had learned the value of my manashke at Tartak. Sometimes, when we saw the prisoners transporting the big vats of soup, we would run by and dunk our manashkes into the deep pot to make off with an extra portion. One time I was caught doing this and the beating I received dissuaded me from trying that again. The kapo who caught me tossed me headfirst into a barrel and beat me severely, giving me ten blows with his cane. The consequences for our crimes were always disproportionate, and the kapos were often as cruel as the Nazis themselves.

Even on Sundays, our brief break from grueling work, the prisoners’ minds were still working, and there was always the threat of a selection or killing. We thought about our lives before the war, about the loss, and pain, and suffering. Without work or a way to keep our hands busy, we focused more on our hunger and exhaustion. Many hurled themselves against the electrified fences to end their misery. I recall more of these suicides occurring on Sundays.

Kiva and I spent a lot of time playing cards. We especially liked the game “1000,” similar to gin rummy. We were just two young teenagers who never imagined, as young boys in our wonderful town of Wierzbnik, that our lives would be upended so violently and so completely.

On Rosh Hashanah 1944, during the afternoon appel, there was a selection. Kiva and I were among the group of mostly younger or weaker prisoners sent to the quarantine barracks. The quarantine barrack was a holding pen for those destined for the gas chambers. The Nazis especially liked to torment Jewish prisoners by making human sacrifices on Jewish holidays. There were 300 to 400 prisoners in the barracks. The religious, and even those less so, began praying. Some were reciting vidui , the confessional prayers. I recognized two men in their forties, acquaintances of my father, and overheard one saying, “See what they are doing here, what they are doing to us? Nobody will ever know what became of us. No one will ever even know that we were here.” But I know, and all the other survivors know, what became of them, and what became of millions of others who suffered and perished at the hands of the Nazis. Each survivor’s life is a testament to that knowledge.

Moments away from certain death , I only thought of living as the prisoners were being led from the barracks. Kiva and I had paid attention to the changing of the guards, and when the time was right, I knew that again, like during the procession toward the trains in Wierzbnik, that I had to take my chances and plan my escape. As I stood at the threshold of the barrack, I looked left and then right, and realized, by some miracle, that there were no guards around. Like the day of the Aktzia in Wierzbnik when I walked away from the train, an invisible hand guided me as I ran into a neighboring barrack. Kiva, too, ran out at the same moment.

My heart pounded as I slid my emaciated body feet-first onto my stomach and into, as luck would have it, a tiny heating oven. From inside, I closed the door of the oven with one finger. Auschwitz had been a Polish Army base before the war, so the barracks were equipped with ovens to heat the barracks in winter. (Of course, the ovens were not used to heat the barracks for us. In the barracks, we relied solely on each other’s body heat, which, as emaciated as we were, provided little warmth.)

Now, inside this tiny space, I contorted my body. I could hear other prisoners being taken away. People were crying and screaming.

I remained still, listening to the pounding of my heart, trying to slow and steady my breath.

Thank God I was able to hide, to cheat death again. So close, so close to death. God? Why was I thanking God? No! I don’t believe in God. There is no God here in this camp. I am thankful, and I am grateful for life, but I cannot thank God for this miracle. It is just a miracle. But can there be miracles without God? It is so confusing. No, the God I grew up with could never let this happen to my family, to me, to the Jews, to human beings. There cannot be a God in heaven.

When the screaming and crying stopped, and thinking that no one was there, I let myself out. I was confronted by an incredulous Polish kapo who watched me emerge from the tiny oven.

He grabbed me by the ear. “Where did you hide?” he questioned.

I cried, begging him that I should live. I could not remember the last time I had cried, but now a stream of tears shed easily. I showed him the tiny oven where I had hidden. He let me go, and I returned to my previous barrack. With all the odds against him, Kiva, who had run in the opposite direction from me, had thankfully also found a hiding place, and now we were reunited. We had cheated death again, and now we managed to blend in with a new group of prisoners.

I sought out my uncle and gave him the gold coin my father had entrusted to me. I sensed that time was running out for us. Like the Gypsies, perhaps it was time to clear out the old, and replace us with the newly arrived. I asked my uncle to exchange the coin for smaller currency. A functioning black market operated within the camp, an example of human beings’ desperate ability to procure the most basic of human necessities: food, water, clothing. We were all in survival mode, doing things not imaginable in times of peace. We were not proud of those acts such as stealing, but did what we had to do to survive. Those who worked in the kitchen had the best jobs in the camp. They often sold extra rations for money, which they used to buy themselves new shoes or a blanket, or some small creature comfort to help them stay dry, warm, strong.

The following week, on Yom Kippur , the Jewish Day of Atonement, Kiva and I decided to observe the ritual fast. We did this from a sense of tradition and respect for our families, less from a religious bent, or from a belief in God. Of course, we saved our daily meager portions of bread to eat after the holiday. We certainly had no intent to give up our rations altogether.

Once again, the Nazis intended to kill more Jews on a sacred Jewish day. This time, the youngest prisoners were targeted. Those from my barrack were sent to a selection conducted by the infamous Dr. Mengele. Mengele set up a measurement system for selection in front of the latrines. The measurement was one meter fifty centimeters (approximately 59 inches). Kiva and I were small and would not have passed the selection. We returned to the barrack to hide out. At roll call, we each took a pail, turned them over, and stood on them to make ourselves appear taller. A guard discovered us standing on the overturned pails. He took us by the shirt collars and sent us to the quarantine barrack, scheduled for liquidation. Again, this occurred on another sacred Jewish holiday. Kiva and I found ourselves in a quarantine barrack waiting to be sent to the gas chamber. I climbed up to the top bunk. Kiva and I changed our minds about the Yom Kippur fast. We were in the quarantine barrack and slated for the gas chamber, so where was the logic in holding on to a paltry ration of bread?

The portions were so poorly made that we held the pieces with two hands, or else the bread would simply fall to crumbs as we devoured it.

We saw nowhere to hide and no route of escape. Time was running out. The Germans intended to take us to the gas chambers before the gates of repentance closed, marking the end of Yom Kippur.

I started to feel it, that familiar pang, like hunger. Fear gripped my belly. It rose up and spread throughout my body until an electric pulse coursed through my veins. Time slowed and my senses were on high alert. The fear energized, yet exhausted me, and even though I was afraid to sleep, my eyes closed and I was in absolute darkness. I slept, but did not dream, nor did nightmares disturb my deep slumber.

I don’t know how long I slept, but when I awoke the fear that was abated during my deep slumber returned at once. I felt devastated, utterly abandoned when I looked around and realized that Kiva was gone. I was startled to realize Kiva had sneaked out onto the roof and must have hidden in another barrack, leaving me alone and to my own fate. Perhaps Kiva feared our capture if caught together. Perhaps this was his moment of selfish truth – his moment to save himself, with no thought of anyone else. My thoughts turned to Chaskel. We all had to make choices, and our circumstances made our choosing painful and final. I too had made decisions to save myself, without regard to anyone else. Although we depended upon others, and took comfort in having someone to look out for us, we were all, in fact, on our own, seeking survival. Sometimes there is not safety in numbers. Sometimes there is only safety in looking after oneself.

When my uncle learned I was in the quarantine barracks and would be sent to the gas chambers, he went to the kapo, Yignatz, to plead for my life. My uncle had been unable to exchange the coin for smaller amounts, so he offered the kapo the gold coin itself. The kapo wanted more, but accepted what my uncle had to give. The gold coin my father had bravely hidden, worth about one hundred dollars, would go a long way on the black market, and would serve the kapo well.

Minutes before the barracks were to be emptied, and prisoners taken to the gas chambers, the kapo, Yignatz, entered and called out “Michael Baranek.” Many claimed to be “Baranek,” but my uncle, whose tattooed number was in sequence with mine, had wisely given the kapo my number, to ensure that the right person would be saved. Kapo Yignatz whisked me from the quarantine barrack with not three minutes to spare before the trucks backed up, taking those souls to their deaths in the nearby gas chambers. He took me back to his barrack, where I was again reunited with Kiva. I was happy to see that again my friend and I had both survived, but we both knew the truth, that Kiva had left me sleeping while he found a way to escape.

A month later, on October 7, 1944, around the holiday of Sukkot, we saw prisoners being sent to the gas chambers. My heart hardened. I was thankful that it was they, and not I, going to certain death. After a short while, however, those condemned souls returned to the barracks.

A revolt had occurred at the gas chamber. Three young women had smuggled dynamite into the camp and had given it to the Sondercommando . The Sondercommando transported the endless number of corpses from the gas chamber to the crematorium. The morale of this group was, understandably, among the lowest of any camp prisoners. They were in the unenviable position of having their job depend upon having other prisoners gassed. These units were replaced every two to three months, in part to prevent the survival of any eyewitnesses of the Nazi’s horrific actions. This Sondercommando was able to use the dynamite to explode Crematorium Number Four. The three brave young women were found out and were hanged. But as a result of the explosion and the looming end of the war, the Germans stopped using the gas chambers in Birkenau in the late autumn of 1944. Finally, there came an end to the stream of black smoke pouring forth from the chimneys, carrying ashes of the victims into the Polish sky.

That same month, we were transferred to D Camp, a more secure camp than C Camp. Selections were conducted in C Camp before the transfer. Kiva and I were selected for work in the “Shisse Commando.” We tried to stay busy and out of sight. We assisted in unloading arriving prisoners’ personal belongings and sorting them. These prisoners were destined for the gas chambers. Kiva and I were ordered to pull carts, picking up and delivering items throughout the camp. We tied a rope around our bodies to help pull the heavy carts. Our boss was a German political prisoner, a fairly decent man. Each day, he would specify where Kiva and I would go. We gathered clothes on some days, and wood on other days, for transport. Our access to the baggage confiscated from the arriving prisoners allowed us to pocket small things for ourselves, or items that could be sold or traded on the black market, such as socks or gloves. This small pilfering helped us to gain an advantage, to have some comfort or to elude death for a while longer. With each passing day of 1944, we were all closer to freedom, a fact not known to us. I could not allow myself to dream of freedom. I needed to remain focused upon the incremental task of surviving – for one more morning, one more afternoon, one more night – for one more hour.