I Am Juden

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by Stephen Uzzell


  The jeep stopped outside and Rogarden said, ‘Here we are.’

  I studied the house. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘What were you expecting?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well. This is the place. Take as long as you need, my friend. We’re not going anywhere.’

  ‘I haven’t seen them for many years.’

  ‘So stop wasting time,’ Rogarden urged gently. ‘Don’t worry about us. Whenever you’re ready to go. It’s entirely up to you.’

  ‘You’ll come in, surely.’

  ‘Thank-you, but no. Perhaps later. Certainly not for a decent while.’

  ‘Alright, then.’ I opened the door. It was another half a minute before I found the strength to climb out. ‘I would offer to bring you a fish sandwich, but…’

  ‘If you managed to find any fresh fish out here, I might eat it. I’m sure Fleck would appreciate a bite later, if it wasn’t too much trouble. Now go on. They’re waiting for you.’

  Rogarden watched as I stepped slowly up to the front door, which opened without being knocked, displaying the fanned arms of two beaming women, my mother and sister. I lifted my boots over the threshold into their collective embrace and the door closed behind them. In the front window, the curtain lifted and a child’s mouth blew out the Hanukah candles.

  57

  The end came on January 17th 1945, as the first Red Army guns boomed over Auschwitz’ evening roll call. Although for you, my child, it was just the beginning.

  We expected the Soviets would enter the nearby town of Oswiecim in the morning. They would find our camp shortly after. Evacuations had been underway for days by this point, with tens of thousands of prisoners forced to trudge west through heavy blizzards, towards the subcamps at Gliwice and Althammer. The Death Marches. One simple rule: any prisoner who slowed, for any reason, was shot. Nobody could be left behind.

  Before the Soviets could arrive, the decision was taken to evacuate the remaining 30,000 prisoners towards Loslau some forty miles away, where survivors would be put on freight trains to the furthest flung territories. This would be my final job: to accompany the Death March. When prisoners stumbled in snow drifts, they would still need a helping hand. Most were in various stages of starvation; many had only wooden shoes or rags to cover their feet.

  Overnight temperatures in Upper Silesia plummeted to −20 °C. When I assembled my prisoners under the Appelplatz floodlights for the final dawn roll call, two women were missing. According to the block twelve Kapo, Devorah Montefiore, your mother, was too ill to move from her bunk. Another woman had stayed behind to nurse her. Ernst Hanning, the superior SS officer in charge of the count, ordered me into the women’s dormitory. I knew what was expected: bring them out, or leave them dead. As I hustled across the snow, I conjured a third way. I could certainly make it sound like I’d killed them: two shots fired into an empty mattress. I could come out alone, and we could leave the women to fend for themselves. Unfortunately, Ernst Hanning changed his mind at the last minute and decided to accompany me.

  ‘This could be a trap,’ he said, brushing past with his pistol unholstered. ‘What do you know about Montefiore?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I lied.

  I had seen the strange way the doctor examined your mother during Amon Goethe’s Health Aktion last October, ripping her tunic off to fondle her breasts. For once there was nothing sexual in the doctor’s actions. Suspecting Montefiore of having fallen pregnant, he was trying, unsuccessfully on this occasion, to stimulate milk.

  I held the dormitory door open and followed Hanning across the threshold. Devorah Montefiore was pale and still, the thin blanket pulled up over her breathless face. Standing at her side, the friend cradled a bundled and bloodied sheet. The fingertips of the woman’s other hand poked out from the sheet, supporting the back of a tiny pink head, matted with raven curls. You have your mother’s curls, my sweet.

  ‘And that one?’ I said, pointing to the body under the blanket.

  The friend nodded, dry-eyed. ‘Devorah didn’t make it. What will happen now?’

  ‘What happens is up to you,’ Hanning said. ‘We either leave the mother and child or we leave all three of you. Makes no difference to us.’

  Before she could answer, I tried one vain appeal, to Hanning’s survival instinct. ‘If we have to negotiate our terms of surrender with the Soviets, the baby could be a bargaining chip.’

  ‘One baby’s not going to save us now, man,’ he said. ‘Take it out back. Not in front of the others.’

  There was no point pleading the case. Devorah Montefiore’s friend transferred your bundled warmth into my arms and then followed Hanning back out to the Appelplatz.

  I waited for his long column of prisoners to start marching past the chimneys that were supposed to be their only exits, and then file out through the mendacious gates. When I could no longer see Hanning through the frosted glass, I took a blanket from an empty bunk and tied it around my shoulders, fashioning a sling. Lodging you inside, I drew on my greatcoat, leaving two buttons open in the middle for you to breathe, and hurried through the deserted camp towards Kanada, the vast repository of purloined Jewish clothing relieved from prisoners upon their arrival. Most warehouses that comprised the complex had been razed in the last few weeks, but not all. According to subsequent newspaper reports, the Soviet Army's 322nd Rifle Division would find 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 women's garments, and 7.7 tons of human hair.

  I didn’t have much difficulty shedding my uniform and finding civilian clothes that fit. In my new guise, we left the camp and turned east, away from the Death March. Instead of being fastened beneath my rough SS greatcoat, you were now slung beneath a rich fur coat, a far more accommodating skin. Within five minutes you were snoring.

  Walking on the highway towards Zaborze, we eventually encountered our first group of Soviet soldiers. But they were far from friendly faces. I wondered if they suspected me of being a disguised German. They asked for my Grana wristwatch, which I had forgotten to take off and leave with the rest of Harry Mohnke’s possessions. When I handed it over, they asked for money.

  I told them, ‘My name is Jozef Siegler. I am Juden. Juden. I have no money. We’ve come from the concentration camp.’

  ‘Jew,’ the soldier said to his comrades. ‘Just our luck. Nobody likes Jews. Germans don’t like Jews, Poles don’t like Jews, and we don’t like Jews.’

  ‘Please,’ I said, opening my fur to show the baby. ‘She is all I have left.’

  ‘Not quite,’ the soldier said, and motioned for me to remove the coat. Wearing it draped around his shoulders, he lifted his rifle and chased us off the road into the forest.

  *

  We ended up in Dusseldorf in 1946, where I found work with a shoe-maker, and from there passed through a series of Displaced Persons camps, set up by the US Army. Once more we were transported cross country in German railroad cars. Conditions in the D.P. camps were not much better. Ten GI’s in charge of thousands of Jews, housed in pig sties and fed on slop.

  Eventually we travelled to Bremerhaven, a German port in the English sector. Yet another camp. We shared a room with four other couples, all newlyweds, keen to make up for lost time. For the first time in a year, you were not the one who kept me awake all night, my child.

  In Bremerhaven we lived on nothing but dried potatoes. Meat was a rumour. Packages of food that arrived from the Red Cross were stolen by Germans working at the camp.

  *

  The SS Marine Flasher was completed as a C4 type troopship shortly after V-J Day, and first set sail from San Francisco for Okinawa and Inchon, Korea in September 1945. She returned to Seattle in November, and left again on Christmas Day for Shanghai. In February she arrived once more in Los Angeles, and on March 7th, departed for New York via the Panama Canal. On the 25th April 1946, she left Manhattan for the heavily-damaged north German port of Bremer, in what we now call the English sector. Now, thanks to President Truman’s Displaced Persons Act, which re
opened immigration to the United States by allowing a maximum of 38,681 refugees to enter the country each year, the Flasher is set to be the first ship to leave Europe with 795 refugees on board.

  Paperwork from the American consulate took several months to complete, but now, finally, we are ready. It is 13th May, 1946. In four days’ time, the SS Marine Perch follows with another 566. No other country has yet offered asylum.

  I stood on the Flasher’s deck with you in my arms. Down below, Bremen was strung with banners to mark our departure. A band of American servicemen played Glenn Miller jazz tunes to prepare us for our New World home. If we find ourselves in the mood at Tuxedo Junction on a juke box Saturday night, the conductor told the baffled passengers, at least we’d know the moves for the Chatanooga Choo-Choo.

  Once at sea, with Europe safely behind us, we headed downstairs. Since the Flasher was a troop ship, designed for marines, there are no cabins. We have a hammock in a stateroom with some forty other refugee families. At mealtimes, we eat at table number eight on the B Deck Dining Room. The first meal was served at noon, while the crew were preparing for departure. After lunch, each passenger received a shiny orange. This simple piece of fruit reduced grown men and women to fits of tears. Several of the older passengers fainted. One woman explained that she had not seen an orange since 1939.

  The weather turned very cold as we left the English Channel, and women were soon sorting through their trunks and boxes for winter coats. The cold snap heralded an enormous storm that has so far tracked us for eight days, almost the entire length of the voyage. Although the passengers continue to be overwhelmed by the variety of the B Deck Dining Room’s daily buffet, most were unable to eat due to chronic seasickness. Even the hardy American mariners had seen nothing like it before, the ocean transformed into towering mountains of water over which we climb and drop, climb and drop.

  Today brings the first calm we have known for over a week, and in the relief from the crashing waves, I hear shouts from outside in all kinds of languages.

  But there is one English word that I hear above all others, and it is the sound of freedom.

  I lift you from the hammock and run up to the deck. Hundreds of fellow refugees have coalesced into a single cheering crowd, jostling for the first view of New York over the railings. I hold you aloft, and there she is, standing tall on Ellis Island, the new colossus, her torch aloft.

  Liberty.

  What Did You Think of I Am Juden?

  First of all, thank you so much for purchasing I Am Juden. I know you could have picked any number of books to read, but you picked my book and for that I am extremely grateful. I hope that it added some value and quality to your everyday life.

  If you enjoyed this book and found some benefit in reading this, I’d like to hear from you and hope that you could take some time to post a review on Amazon. Your feedback and support will help this author to greatly improve his writing craft for future projects and make this book even better.

  You can follow this link to https://www.amazon.co.uk/I-Am-Juden-Undercover-SS-ebook/dp/B07MRL9TX3/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1551480404&sr=8-1&keywords=i+am+juden now.

  Or Amazon America, or India, or wherever you may be!

  I want you, the reader, to know that your review is very important and so, if you’d like to leave a review, all you have to do is click and away you go.

  A follow-up to this novel The Ballad of Liberty Siegler will be published on May 23rd 2019. For more information about the characters in I Am Juden, and for updates on The Ballad of Liberty Siegler, please follow me on Twitter: @StephenUzzell2

  I wish you a long life of many happy reading adventures to come.

  Stephen Uzzell

 

 

 


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