Every morning, Jack woke up starving. “It is almost impossible to describe this hunger that consumed us,” Jack said. “It was a pain in the stomach so severe, it altered the mind. We could not think or talk of anything but food.”
Food. Prisoners would say that if once—just once—they could feel full, then they could die happy. Moniek’s fantasy was to have a whole loaf of bread all to himself. “When I am a free man,” he would say, his eyes twinkling with anticipation, “I will have a big round of the best bread and I will cut it up piece by piece and eat it just as slow or fast as I want.”
Jack’s fantasy was much more elaborate:
My perfect meal, prepared by my mother, of course, begins with rich chicken soup brimming with fat handmade noodles. This is followed by succulent roast duck, all you can eat. There are so many side dishes, you can hardly count them—potatoes of all kinds, and cabbage and every other vegetable, and delicious breads. By then, we have eaten so much, we are in a daze, but we finish with some delicious apple strudel and a glass of lemonade made from real lemons.
As his stomach ached from hunger, Jack’s memories were of wonderful family dinners, when his mother would beg him and his sister and brother to eat more, even though they were already stuffed.
When his reveries ended, he was still in a filthy, threadbare, lice-infested uniform in a miserable camp crowded with starving and dying prisoners. Each day, prisoners got the thin soup and the foul bread, but portions grew smaller and smaller.
Typhus was taking many lives. Moniek worried he would catch it, because he had never had it. Jack’s fear was not typhus, since he had already had a light case, but starvation. Either he would actually starve to death or become so weak that he could no longer work, and then he would be shipped to the gas chambers.
At some point the prisoners knew 1944 had become 1945. That winter was the worst yet. Jack and Moniek were taken by truck with other prisoners to various places to help clear the rubble left from Allied bombing raids over Germany. All day long they removed debris from destroyed buildings. The few civilians they saw in the distance seemed dejected and hungry and paid no attention to the prisoners.
Did the bombings by the combined forces of France, England, Russia, and the United States mean Hitler was losing? Camp rumors were insistent that Hitler’s government was starting to collapse and Russian troops were moving toward Germany. Even if this was true, would they arrive in time to save anybody inside the camps?
Jack could feel his strength ebbing away. He did not know his weight, though he knew it was well under one hundred pounds. He had been lean since the early days of the war, but now he was emaciated—so thin that his bones stuck out and his face looked craggy and old. It would take a miracle for him to survive much longer, and miracles were in short supply in the concentration camps.
Then one occurred.
First, Jack and Moniek were ordered to report to a storage room next to the kitchen to peel potatoes for the guards’ soup. With an SS guard standing over them, they peeled all day long. The dirty discarded peelings were put in the prisoners’ soup. As Jack and Moniek worked, each managed to make a few peels extra thick, so they contained some potato, and then slip these into their pockets to eat later. Even this tiny bit of nourishment, they knew, would help them stay alive a little longer.
They worked hard and tried to be cooperative and likable. Moniek was soon telling jokes, determined to get the guard to smile. Each day, it was the same guard. Like all guards, he acted stern and unfriendly and often threatened to beat them if they did not work faster.
But he never hit them, nor did he ever tell Moniek to shut up. And then one day, after several weeks of peeling potatoes—weeks they were grateful to have the peelings and not to be working outside in the freezing cold—they reported for work and were told by this guard that the cook and his helper had come down with typhus. Jack and Moniek, he said, must take over the cooking.
“We could only stare at him in astonishment,” recalled Jack. “Had he gotten us this job? But he would not look at us, and we did not see him after that.”
Being a cook was the most valued job in the camp. As long as there was any food at all, bad as it was, the cooks would not starve. You did not need to know how to cook. All you did was boil water and vegetables together to make the thin soup.
The boys immediately moved into the kitchen, fearful that if they were not there every moment, someone would take over their jobs. The kitchen was a big room, and it was warm. In the center were three huge kettles, each four feet tall, hung over beds of hot coals. Soup ingredients were whatever had been scrounged up: turnips, potatoes, beets, spinach. The boys were not allowed to wash or peel these items or even to cut off rotten parts. The spinach was full of sand.
“It felt like grit in your teeth. The soup always smelled and tasted horrible, but we were all used to it,” Jack said. “The soup cooked slowly all night in those huge pots. We made up a little bed in the corner and took turns sleeping, making sure one of us was always awake and alert. We took our job very seriously. The guards came and went from the kitchen, but there were times when no guards were actually in the room. When we were alone, we stole what we could for ourselves and to give to our friends.”
The guards’ food was cooked elsewhere and brought to the camp for Jack and Moniek to heat and serve. “When we dared, we took some of it and made a little soup for ourselves in a small pot we had found,” Jack said. “There were shortages of food everywhere, and the guards’ food was not much better than ours, but at least their vegetables were clean and not rotten, and their bread was not made with sawdust.”
One time, they had their little pot cooking when they heard the guards coming. In a split second, the boys grabbed the pot and plopped it deep into one of the big kettles of soup. Once when loaves of the sawdust-filled bread—which was baked away from the camp—were being brought into the kitchen, Moniek distracted the guard who was counting them. Because of this, the guard ended up undercounting the delivery by ten loaves. The boys hid the extra bread under the coal beds. They kept some for themselves and slipped the rest to starving friends.
Food had become so scarce that each prisoner was issued a monthly meal ticket, which was punched when he went through the food line to prevent the possibility of someone going through the line twice. Jack and Moniek had tickets but did not need them. They gave them to friends so they could eat twice. Jack’s ticket went to a tailor named Salek, who in return helped Jack by keeping his uniform clean and repaired.
Someone told camp authorities what the boys were doing—probably a prisoner who got extra bread for informing on them. The boys were pouring water into the huge soup kettles when guards descended on the kitchen.
“We heard their boots stomping toward us outside the building,” Jack said. “They stormed through the door and surrounded us, their guns pointed at us. We threw our hands in the air, certain we were going to die, though we did not know why.
“A minute later, the head commandant of the camp came in. I will never forget him. He was all shiny boots and official uniform. He was an older man, tired-looking, thin, with gray hair.”
He glared at the boys. “Give me your meal tickets!” he demanded gruffly.
“We had them in our pockets,” Jack said, “because we both insisted our friends give them back to us each time they used them just in case this very thing happened.”
With shaking hands, they handed over the tickets. Jack knew they could still be shot. Any excuse—even an accusation that could not be proved—was enough.
But the commandant looked satisfied, perhaps even relieved. He signaled the guards, and they left without a word. Jack and Moniek collapsed in relief.
“I do not know why he spared us,” Jack said. “Prisoners were killed all the time for far less. But he could tell by the low camp numbers on our uniforms that we were both old-timers. He was one himself. Maybe that was why.”
Once, a horse wandered up to the camp gate. It was a skinny, bony old horse, probably diseased, but to everyone in the camp, it represented food. Prisoners who had once been butchers by trade took over. The guards got the choice meat in their soup, and Moniek and Jack added the rest to the prisoners’ soup.
“That was a memorable meal,” Jack recalled. “There was not much to go around, but we enjoyed it nonetheless. When you are starving, horse meat is not so bad.”