The Journey of Anna Eichenwald

by Donald Hunt

  On Wednesday she got what she was waiting for. Roland walked past her during lunch and without looking at her, quickly spoke.

  “They have what you have asked for.”

  “I’ll be there tonight,” she replied quickly.

  Anna had the routine in the women’s barracks down pat. Two female guards worked in 24-hour shifts. They generally stayed to themselves in their quarters, played cards and smoked. The barracks doors were locked but could be opened from the inside. They would not re-lock unless completely shut. Anna’s plan was to leave her exit door slightly ajar so she could get back inside.

  After supper she lay down in her black topcoat and covered herself with her blanket. The guards had completed their evening count. Anna had told Erika what she would be doing. The night was overcast and the weather had turned colder with a few snow flurries. There were four guard towers between the women’s barracks and block-66. Anna’s plan was to hug the fence because the flood lights from the towers were aimed at the men’s barracks. In contrast, a person in a dark coat walking close to the fence would be difficult to notice. If she were noticed she would be shot as an escapee.

  Anna waited 30 minutes after she saw the light go out in the guard’s quarters. The women in the barracks were sleeping except for Erika. Anna got up, walked quietly to the rear door and pushed it open. She placed a small pebble at the bottom to prevent the door from completely closing.

  The cold wind hit her face. She hugged the side of the building until she reached the end. Now the first guard tower was in view. Getting from her barracks to the fence would be the greatest risk. The floodlights prohibited her from seeing inside the tower. She stood for a moment and then was ready to make her move. Suddenly she froze. There were two guards on the walkway apparently making evening rounds. They had stopped to talk with the guards in the tower. Their backs were to her and she saw they might be distracting the men in the tower. Suddenly, as if some force compelled her, she darted across the walk to the fence. If she was going to be seen, she’d know it immediately.

  She held her breath. But the guards continued talking. They were all laughing at something one of them had said. The guards on the walkway moved on into the cold, night air. Anna stayed about 50 feet behind them, hugging the fence as if stalking them. She moved at their pace. She no longer noticed the cold.

  The men in block-66 were waiting for her. As soon as she knocked softly on the door, Beryl opened it.

  “Do you want something warm to drink?” he asked after pulling her inside. “Later. Where is he?”

  She followed Beryl to the interior of the block, shed her coat and without thinking, handed it to Beryl. It had been more than two years since Anna had functioned as a doctor. It was as natural to her as breathing.

  Eric looked unchanged. She took a small flashlight and looked into his mouth. The ulcerations appeared less angry. The warm salt solution was helping. She took the stethoscope and disengaged one of the rubber tubes. She then covered it with cooking oil and inserted it into Eric’s nose and down his esophagus. When she thought it had reached his stomach, she took the earpiece of the stethoscope with the remaining tube placed into her right ear. She looked at Julian.

  “Gently blow into the tube,” she said, handing it to him. “Good!”

  The tube was in his stomach. She took a string and double looped it around the tube, then tied it around Eric’s head. She looked at Beryl.

  “I need the syringe, milk and eggs.” When she had them she continued.

  “Every three hours around the clock, I want you to give him one raw egg mixed with four ounces of milk.”

  She took a cup, broke the egg into it then filled it with milk. She attached the syringe to the tube and slowly poured the mixture into the syringe, holding it up. Gravity delivered it into his stomach.

  “He’ll need the tube feeding around the clock without fail,” she said, looking at Julian. “And he’ll need someone with him at all times to see he does not pull the tube out.”

  “Done,” said Julian. Anna turned to go.

  “By the way, where did you get the milk and eggs?”

  Julian looked at Anna admiringly. “If I told you, you would not believe me.”

  “Fair enough,” she said. Then she did something unexpected and unplanned. She walked over to Julian, put her arms around his neck and hugged him. She did the same to Beryl. Afterward, both men walked with her to the door.

  “God bless you, both,” she whispered. “God bless you.”

  The next few days were uneventful. Erika and Anna spent significant time talking hopefully about Eric. Anna anticipated that two weeks of forced feeding would be necessary before he would be able to eat on his own. As his nutrition improved, his ability to fight infection would improve. Anna had made it clear to the men of block-66 that all of the boys needed vitamins, but especially the younger ones.

  The following Sunday Anna had to restrain herself to keep from running to block-66.

  “Slow down!” Erika finally said softly. “They’re going to see you and they will know you are up to something.”

  Anna slowed her pace. By the time she reached the block she was almost afraid to go inside. Would he be better? Would he be alive?

  Beryl met her at the door. She was afraid to ask so she simply said, “How are the children?”

  “Better. Improving.”

  Anna’s heart was pounding. “Where is he?”

  “Come with me.”

  Eric was sitting in a chair by the exam area waiting for Anna. He still looked frail and swollen but he was supporting himself and actually had expression in his eyes. After just four days of the high protein feedings his body was drinking in the nourishment as a suffocating man would gulp for air. He was not only getting protein and calories but minerals from the goat’s milk. Anna was thrilled with what she saw. Later, she learned the men had gotten him some vitamins from the same source as the milk and eggs.

  Sick call that day was down to about 25 boys. The increase in Danish Red Cross packages was improving the overall situation. Before leaving, she instructed Julian and Beryl to pull the feeding tube from Eric on Wednesday. This would give him a full week of feedings. As she left she was already anxious for her next visit.

  For more than a year, a number of men in the camp underground had been working on an escape plan. Most were Jewish and two were from the French underground; Roland Montague and Pierre Oberaud.

  All of the men working on the plan worked in the V-2 facility except for Ehud Katz and Chaim Nussbam. They both worked in a SS armament plant that made explosives, including artillery shells and hand grenades. This plant was heavily guarded and carefully monitored. In all, there were nine men working on the project. All lived in the same barracks. All had been in Buchenwald for two years and all were in reasonably good health.

  The motivation behind the plan was due to several factors. They had witnessed the continual random killing of men. Eleven months earlier, two young men in their 20s had killed a guard with a knife and attempted to blow a hole in the electrified fence using a hand grenade taken from the guard. They were caught and hanged naked upside down by their ankles for six hours on the parade ground. About 2,000 prisoners were marched out to the area to watch as they were shot in the head as an example. None of the men planning the escape expected to die in camp. They were not motivated by fear, but by a desire to create turmoil. If they could get to Allied lines, all the better.

  In the latter days of January 1945, something occurred that pushed their plan into action. Late one afternoon, some 700 prisoners arrived from Auschwitz. As the Russians were closing in on Poland, the Germans had begun evacuating the death camps. In early January, 60,000 men from Auschwitz were sent to various camps in Germany, some on forced death marches, some by train. Three thousand men were marched to Buchenwald with little food or clothing, all of them Jewish. Along the wa
y, hundreds fell by the road from exhaustion. They were all shot and left by the roadside. In the final few days of the march, 10 men escaped into the forest around Weimer. The guards did not bother to chase them. It was becoming obvious that the Nazis were not going to allow their death and concentration camps captured full of prisoners to testify to their horrors. The men from Auschwitz who did escape told of enormous pits of dead bodies that were being burned to destroy evidence. There were an estimated 80,000 men in Buchenwald. The men in the underground were beginning to wonder if the Germans intended to try to kill them all before the allies came.

  The head of the escape committee was Pierre Oberaud, a Frenchman who had been a police lieutenant before the war. After the fall of France, he had worked in the resistance. He was caught in December 1944, when a paid informant turned him over to the Gestapo. Now his goal in life was to escape and return to deal with the informant.

  The men of barracks-12 were well organized and had come into the camp with skills. One of the men was an electrical engineer. Another had been a mathematics teacher.

  Barracks-12 was located on the perimeter of the camp, only 24 feet from the electrified fence. For more than a year, the men had been digging an escape tunnel under the walkway and under the fence. They worked every night in three hour shifts with three men to a shift. They had a pulley cart on wheels for moving the soil and progressed further into the tunnel at a rate of about a foot every four or five days. The major challenge they faced was disposal of the dirt. It was moist and had a significant clay component, so the tunnel needed only a moderate amount of shoring.

  The tunnel was eight feet below ground. The men who worked in the armament plant walked to work and dispersed the dirt along their one-mile walk. They would fill their pockets and drop handfuls of soil every 100 feet or so. Other men got rid of soil when cleaning the latrines. One of the men worked as a gardener close to the administration building and proved most helpful at disposing of the dirt.

  The tunnel had been finished for more than a month. They had taken the tunnel to within one foot of the surface, 30 feet outside the fence. Their exit sight would deploy into a clump of trees if their direction was accurate. Now they needed the right time to go.

  The break came when a Jewish locksmith was asked to repair the main door of the arms storage area in the south camp section. This was a separate building, a window-less concrete bunker. The walls were two feet thick and steel reinforced. The door was solid steel, four inches thick. It was built to withstand a direct hit in a bombing raid. The lock was a complex double key lock mechanism. One key was kept by the arms quartermaster for the entire camp and one was kept in the SS commandant’s office. Because of this double lock system, security for the arms cash was never a concern. The lock mechanism was dismantled by the locksmith and he took it to a workshop to rebuild. While there was no lock, the bunker required 24-hour guards. A SS sergeant stayed with the locksmith while he worked on the mechanism but paid little attention to what he was doing. The work was tedious and took two days to complete. As he re-mastered the keys, he made two sets, all unnoticed by the sergeant. When the mechanism was reinstalled he left the duplicates hidden in his workshop.

  The arms quartermaster met the locksmith at the bunker. The repairman got a brief glimpse inside and noted boxes of ammunition, explosives and hand grenades. There were rifles and pistols, but they appeared to be locked in separate vaults. The rebuilt lock system functioned well with the double key mechanism. The duplicate keys were safely hidden. The locksmith, a man from Warsaw named Martin Lazar, would pass the information to Roland by an intermediary.

  When Roland received the news the following day, he convened an urgent meeting of the escape committee and set it for midnight. The kapo for block-12 knew of the plan but had not yet decided to stay or to go.

  Some 30 men in block-12 were aware of the tunnel. They had decided not to be involved in the attempt but to take their chances staying in the camp. They believed the escapees would be tracked down and shot. They were also aware of something the Germans called ‘collective responsibility.’ In the past, escape attempts had led to severe punishment or sometimes even killing if it was believed that others may have had knowledge of an escape plan. The SS would interrogate everyone in block-12. Anyone who admitted to knowledge of the tunnel would be punished, tortured or killed. This practice kept the escape attempts at a minimum. Everyone knew the more men who attempted to escape, the greater chance of being caught. So it appeared the original nine who dug the tunnel would be the ones to go.

  The tunnel entrance was in a small storage room adjacent to the showers. These were used only on Sundays. The nine men gathered at mid-night. Pierre Oberaud informed the other seven of the keys to the arms bunker.

  “We have been given a stroke of good fortune,” he said. “We have been furnished duplicate keys to the arms bunker. We can get in and get grenades and explosives but not guns, which may be best anyway. We don’t want to get into a shoot-out with the guards. The SS does inventory once a week so we have only a few days to steal and use the explosives.”

  Moshe Unger, the electrical engineer, stepped in. “We will steal a case of hand grenades providing we can get the detonator pins. They may be kept separate from the actual explosives.”

  “We’ll create a diversion by blowing up a guard tower,” said Roland. “We need to be in the tunnel when the explosion goes off. And our plan is to try to kill all of the tracker dogs.

  “How will that be accomplished?” asked Karl Reinhardt, the mathematician.

  “Moshe has an idea to rig a delay action detonator for each grenade,” replied

  Roland. “Men in block-16 are next to the kennel. There are five tracker dogs in separate pens. We have saved chocolate bars to bring them into the open pens. Then we’ll kill them with the grenades. The kennel explosions must be coordinated with the guard tower explosions.”

  “We can be several miles into the forest before they know we are missing and with no dogs to track us, we can make it,” said Pierre.

  “The locksmith is Martin Lazar,” Roland explained further. “We owe everything to him…literally everything. The SS will go immediately for him. When he hears the explosions, he will take a cyanide pill.”

  “Why?” interrupted Pierre. “He can come with us.”

  “He is 60 years old and has no family left,” said Roland. “They killed his wife and son in Poland. He has nothing to live for. It was his choice. This is his way of fighting back. They took his life when they gassed his wife and son.”

  Pierre finished the meeting solemnly.

  “We will get the grenades in the next two days. The following night we will go.” The underground in Buchenwald prison was extensive, probably in excess of 400 men. Since the prison was run by kapos, as long as the work was done and there were no uprisings, things went smoothly. It had been more than two years since any major problem had come up and more than three months since a man had been put on the hanging tree. When the prison was quiet, the only guards visible were those in the towers. That was about to change.

  By this time, there were 80,000 prisoners in a facility designed for 20,000. Because of the enormous overcrowding the kapos could not keep track of all the prisoners, nor did they try. Consequently, if careful, resourceful men could get many things such as flashlights, money, cigarettes, and even knives. The major problem for the underground was that scattered among the barracks were informers who would gladly trade information for improved living conditions, extra food or a night in the brothel. There were barracks where Danish and Belgian POW’s were kept with more humane living conditions. Informers sometimes tried to get transferred into those blocks. But informers were considered traitors and when discovered, they were killed. Being an informer was a dangerous game.

  Karl Reinhardt was playing this game. He was a Communist from Hamburg who had been a Soviet sympathizer. He was suspected of being a
soviet espionage agent but had not been convicted. When he entered the prison in July of 1943, he made a deal with the SS to feed them information but only information considered of major importance. He was anti-Semitic and was suspected by the underground of being a traitor. He lived in block-13, next to the block of the tunnel. He was unaware of the tunnel but knew something unusual was in the air. Two underground men also lived in block-13 and were watching Reinhardt.

  The lock to the arms bunker had been repaired on a Tuesday. The following day the duplicate keys were in Roland’s hands. That night, two men from block-24, next to the arms bunker, let themselves in and took a case of hand grenades. They were relieved to find that the firing pens were in the case in a separate compartment. Arms inventory was done each Sunday and there was no risk the grenades would be discovered missing until they were used. Over the next two days the one dozen grenades made their way to the men who would plant them. Five would go to the men living next to the kennels and the remaining seven to the men adjacent to the guard house tower. Karl Reinhardt suspected that an escape attempt was imminent, but he had no details. He asked another man in block-13 casually if something was ‘going on’. The reply was, “Why do you ask?”

  Immediately Reinhardt understood he was suspected of being an informer. He lost his composure and tried to run out of the barracks to get to a guard tower. Five men blocked the door and quickly stuffed a rag in his mouth. He was dragged to the shower area where another man was waiting.

  “This is what we do to traitors,” he said with an ugly grin, then quickly plunged a knife into the informer’s heart. Later that night, Reinhardt’s body was dragged out of the barracks and placed under a remote barracks. He would not be missed until the following evening when he did not show up for census. It took three more days of searching before his frozen body was found.

  Soon, it was evident that the effort to place a delay on the firing pin would not work. The detonation pins were spring loaded. Once pulled there was a 20-second delay before explosion. Placing the explosives would not be a problem at the kennels but might prove to be a more difficult issue for the guard tower. The men attacking the tower would have to run in the open to escape, and if not successful in taking out the tower, they could easily be caught in machine gun fire. A number of men would be risking their lives for the escape of nine. None of it made sense except as a way of venting their hatred of the Nazis.