by Vic Shayne
In the morning Shmulek and I were awakened by the sound of someone rustling outside. There was no place to hide, so we braced ourselves when we heard footsteps shuffling toward the door. We tried to peer through gaps between the wooden planks of the barn wall, using hand signals to say that someone was about to enter the barn. We were ready to pounce with whatever strength we had left and we crouched behind the door. An older Polish woman dressed in a long skirt, black boots, and a ragged scarf swung open the rustic barn door and looked at us with hardly a surprise in her wrinkled face. Like two schoolboys, we stood before her, waiting to be reprimanded. But the woman didn’t ask us who we were or where we had come from. I suppose she assumed we were Jewish runaways. But this did not matter to her. Instead, she saw in us a mutual benefit, told us to wait where we were and that she would bring food, which she did.
By late morning, after the farm woman fed us, Shmulek and I were put to work for her. We busied ourselves the rest of the day separating ears of corn from their stalks. For the next week or so, we worked hard in exchange for food and shelter. We regained a great deal of our strength and were breathing easier in this place miles from the nearest neighbor. We repaired equipment, fed the woman’s pigs and chickens, slaughtered animals for food, collected eggs, and hauled in crops from the fields. Then one day, without notice, we were told to leave at once. A neighbor had come over to visit and asked who we were and how long we had been working on the woman’s property. The lady tried to explain that we were relatives visiting and helping out, but the neighbor looked at her with too much suspicion. She knew now that it was too dangerous for her to have anything else to do with us. And we were on our way, carrying whatever food we could in our pockets.
Shmulek and I resumed our schedule of walking mostly between dusk and dawn, but in a matter of days we were beginning to starve, and our energy was fading. Our heads were hanging low and we were tripping and falling. One morning, under a clear sky, we at last came to a spot to rest in a field. We decided to take turns sleeping and standing guard. I cannot remember who was given which assignment, but neither of us could win the battle against fatigue. We both fell asleep.
When the morning light came over us, we were awakened with shouts and barking dogs. We got up and began to run as fast as we could. Shmulek went one way and I went another. Polish farmers fired warning shots, but I continued to run as fast as I could. Eventually, I found myself alone in the forest. Shmulek was nowhere in sight. This was the last I ever saw of my dear friend. Like everyone else in my life, he was gone and I was by myself. I called for him in my sleep, but I awoke always alone.
For endless days and nights I wandered in the forest. My head was dizzy with hunger and my tongue was swollen inside my parched mouth. My feet were sore and blistered and my face unshaven, dirty, and covered in small sores. My wounded arm throbbed and my fingers ached. I began to grow senseless. Random words drifted unkindly through my mind: names, places, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian. I don’t know if I was speaking to myself out loud or whether my mind was speaking to me with questions and answers. I was no longer cautious and lost my wits. I would fall down, sleep in the middle of weeds, get up, make my way into the forest, and lay down under the trees then continue on my way again. I don’t know whether I was hallucinating or looking at the world through my half-shut eyes.
It was morning and a flock of black birds flew past me. Their wings flapped over the tree line. There was no breeze. I chewed on a blade of grass but could barely swallow. I wandered away from the forest and found myself scanning the ground for food along a dusty, unpaved road. I felt every rock and pebble through my shoes. I don’t know what I was looking for. Maybe mushrooms or berries. Something. Then I saw a long train on the horizon. It sat motionless. I was so hungry that I dragged my aching body in the direction of the parked train, all the while gazing with dead, hungry eyes at the ground. I don’t know why I was magnetically drawn to the train. I suppose I figured that if there was a train, there must be someone with food nearby. Maybe there was a station, so I walked until I came upon the train. Then I began to walk alongside the cars, peering underneath them in the shadows on the tracks. My head was numb and my ears were ringing. I was so hungry that I couldn’t even hold my head up or lift my feet as I walked. I just wanted to find a piece of bread, any scrap of food or garbage lying on the ground.
I stopped and stared at the train a few meters in front of me, wobbling on my feet. I didn’t even notice the German soldier who came up behind me. A big, starker man, the soldier didn’t even bother to point his rifle at me. I was no threat to him. He looked at me with stone eyes.
“What are you doing away from the train? Get back on the train,” he said.
I understood him, his German simple, guttural, and direct. But I did not realize my own predicament. I did not answer. I was in a daze and, in my delirious way, was relieved to be found. Maybe there was a chance to eat and rest. The soldier pushed me with his rifle.
“You shouldn’t be off the train,” he said. “Get back inside. Go!” The next thing I knew, the door of the train opened up. To my bewilderment, I was standing in front of a wooden car packed with people dressed like they were going on vacation. There were men, women, and children jammed so tightly together that there was almost no room to sit down. One of the men reached out his hand to me and pulled me into the train. The German shouted something I did not understand then slid the heavy wooden door closed. Inside the train, the well-dressed businessman with a small leather valise offered me a piece of bread—the only thing I had eaten in days. We spoke in Yiddish as the train slowly began to pick up speed. He told me the train was mostly carrying Hungarian Jews, but no one knew its destination, only that we were heading west, deeper into German territory. I ate the bread, drank a thimbleful of water, and passed out.
Rocked by the train, weary, hungry, and emotionally drained, I drifted in and out of consciousness. I do not remember much of that trip, but after a couple of days the train screeched to a stop, shoving us all to the front wall of the car. By this time the stench was suffocating. People had died in the car during the journey. They defecated, urinated, and vomited. There was hardly any air to breathe, so when the doors finally flew open there was a rush to jump away, gasping for air and open space. We were jumping from the fire into the frying pan. Our train had reached its final destination: Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
We were met by mean, brutal German guards as well as men in prison uniforms holding clubs and hitting people as they tried to help each other disembark. Mothers were clutching their children and men tried to stay with their wives. A special unit of prisoners was immediately sent out to clean the train cars, dragging the dead and dying onto the ground like sacks of flour. There was mass confusion until we were corralled like cattle into lines and groups. They made some of us stand five to a row in long lines. Others were still milling about in confusion. Never before had I heard the ugliness of the German language. I will always associate it with the sound of abuse and inhumanity. The language of hell.
Right away the Germans began separating people, deciding that some should fall into a queue to the left and others to the right—a process known as a “selection.” Life or death? This was the end for most of the people on my train. Yet, at the time, none of us had any idea that people were being selected to live or to die. Little children, grandmothers, elderly men, and the disabled were shoved to the left. Able-bodied men to the right. I bent over and grabbed a handful of dirt and rubbed it over my wounded arm and tried to hide it from view. Though weak and dizzy from hunger, I tried to stand up straight and tall. In the distance we could see smoke rising from a building. The odor coming from this direction was repulsive; we gagged on it. Floating down on us from the air was a white dust. It was precipitating on this warm, clear day with the rain of human ashes.
A few yards from me a little girl, maybe eight years old, stood crying. She found a young German soldier and tugged on his jacket. He bent d
own as she cried to him that she could not find her mommy. The German said in a soft, almost loving tone, “You want your mommy? You see that smoke coming out over there? There’s your mommy. She’ll be coming out any minute.” In the next instance, and I can still see this in my mind as it has played over and over since that day, the German pulled out his revolver and shot the little girl in the head. He returned his gun into its holster, stepped over the child, and continued shouting orders at people coming off the train cars.
Many years later, when living in Colorado, I went to an event where Holocaust survivors were giving speeches. One of the speakers, a man named Emil Hecht, went to the podium and began to tell a story that amazed me. Mr. Hecht told the audience of how he was arriving at Mauthausen when he watched a German soldier tell a little lost girl that her mommy would soon be coming out of the chimney. Mr. Hecht then described how the soldier shot the girl in the head. My wife, Doris, turned to me excited and said, “That’s your story, Martin!” It was my story. But it was also the story of Emil Hecht who happened to be right there at that same moment as I. I have since spent time with Mr. Hecht, exchanging memories that make us both cry. I still don’t know, though, whether it is more amazing that we both shared the same experience on that same day when we arrived at Mauthausen or that we both survived the Holocaust.
Mauthausen has often been described as the worst of all the Nazi concentration camps ever devised by Hitler’s destructive machine. You might wonder how this can be when there were places like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau. For any individual suffering in a concentration camp, no one place could have been worse than another. Death is death. Suffering is suffering. Yet in terms of its design, purpose, and function, Mauthausen had no pretenses of being anything other than what it was: a place where human beings were brought to suffer a slow, agonizing death. The “work” we were forced to perform had no purpose other than to cause pain and death. Mauthausen was where human beings wasted away until life disintegrated. No words can describe Mauthausen. No words. We didn’t live; we didn’t look for hope. We tried to survive just another minute, thinking with brains that failed us. Starved brains; starved bodies. Vacant eyes. Corpses on legs that were sticks. Bodies in soiled rags. Shoes missing soles. Mouths that would not close. We were abandoned beings, hidden from human dignity and the eyes of the world. We wondered ourselves whether we actually existed.
How can a person survive this? I can only surmise that if God wants you to live, you’ll live; I have no other way to explain. So in telling my story, I do not want to focus on the details of the daily horrors that were continually without hope—these memories are too painful to recall. A nightmare, my time in Mauthausen has never left my psyche in peace and has to this day haunted my dreams, night after night, year after year.
How can you begin to describe a concentration camp? It can only be described in physical terms—not psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually. My mind wants to forget, but at the same time I need to remember so I know I am not crazy. I want to remember for the sake of those who went in and never came out and for those who suffered with so few witnesses to validate what happened. I want to remember so that the world will know the depths of depravity and that there were gas chambers and human bodies burning in ovens. And that for sport, our German captors pushed living human beings off of high cliffs and laughed as the screams terminated with bodies splitting and splaying onto jagged granite down below. I want to add my testimony to the history of mankind and to say that I was there to witness this dark, unspeakable era of horror, hate, injustice, and decay. I toiled night after night loading bodies into ovens. I cannot shut this out of my mind. It is impossible.
What men can do to other men is unbelievable, and Mauthausen concentration camp is the manifestation of man’s potential for extreme ugliness, hate, and negativity. There are many books written on the sick, demented, and barbarous conditions and activities peculiar to the Nazi concentration camps. Without sinking into details of despair and cruelty, I will only say that the Nazis and their collaborators, and all those who failed politically and militarily to lift a finger to help, were the co-creators of this damned abyss.
What was Mauthausen? Where was I? Mauthausen was a group of associated concentration camps in Austria. The specialty of the camp was torture, and the inmates, of which I was one of tens of thousands, consisted not only of Jews but of Jehovah’s Witnesses as well as American prisoners of war, spies, soldiers, OSS (Office of Strategic Services) agents, intelligence officers, Gypsies, resistance fighters, and Russians. The most hated “enemies” of the Nazi state were sent to Mauthausen to die a painful death under the pretense of being sent to a work camp. The Nazi state used Mauthausen to punish its enemies to death under the direction of a stout, dark-haired, round-faced psychopathic camp commandant named Franz Ziereis.
At the site of Mauthausen was an infamous granite quarry. Inmates were driven as slaves to carry heavy slabs of granite up an equally infamous flight of 186 stone steps that became known as the “stairs of death.” Given our starved and weakened condition, this task alone more than often amounted to a death sentence. At the base of the quarry the rocks were stained with blood. Man after man had fallen or was pushed to his death. The German guards found sport in this brutality, enjoying the sights and sounds of human bodies cracking open like eggs against an iron skillet.
In my term at Mauthausen, I was tortured, beaten, made to stand for hours in the frozen air, and had to load lifeless, ruined human beings into furnaces. Some of these people, I am ashamed to admit, were still alive. They were burned alive. How can I bear to remember such things; how can I bear not to? The choice is not mine. There are so many vivid images, odors, sounds, and errant shadows that follow me every waking moment.
I recall one day in particular. We prisoners were made to line up in rows of five and stand at attention as the Germans played a little game. They singled out the Jehovah’s Witnesses among us and brought them to the front of the assembly of prisoners. A German soldier walked over to one of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and handed him a revolver. Then the man was commanded to kill one of the Jews.
“We’ll see how strong your religion is now,” the soldier laughed. “If you don’t shoot one, I will shoot you.”
The game began. But it was a one-sided game. The members of the Jehovah’s Witness religion refused to kill. They would not do it. They would drop their hands to their sides and let the weapon fall to the ground. So the Germans shot them dead. One man after another, watching his brother have his brains blown out, refused to kill a Jew, a fellow human being. In a few minutes there was a pile of dead Jehovah’s Witnesses in a red heap in front of us. None of them even gave a moment’s thought to killing one of us. To this day, if a Jehovah’s Witness finds his way to my door, I will not shut it in his face. I invite him inside for a drink or food and tell him this story.
My survival was merely a miracle. To this day I don’t know how I managed to live, day after day, with my bad arm, my body starving and wasting away, my back broken in several places, and my entire being deteriorating from neglect, beatings, and accidents. All the while I watched so many needless deaths—murders—that the cries and pleas never leave my ears. Innocent men, women, and children were poisoned, gassed, beaten, assaulted, burned, humiliated, abused, hanged, and shot. What kind of a world allows these things to happen?
In this Austrian hell, I lost my soul and my sanity. Was I a human being? Were the others around me humans too? Where was my identity? It was fading, starving along with the rest of us. Knowing that I was once a Yeshiva bocher, the men who knew me asked me to say prayers—to give them even some glimpse of comfort.
They’d ask me, “After I am dead, who will say kaddish for me? Who will say kaddish for my family?”
I had no answer. For all I knew, none of us would survive. The men in my barracks encouraged me to sing Hebrew prayers. It gave them comfort, if not hope. Somehow it offered a shadow of human dignity.
When I
go to the synagogue, even now, I close my eyes and see the faces of those whose lives were wasted, ruined, taken, destroyed, lost. And I say kaddish for them all. I say kaddish for them to keep my promise and to restore dignity to them and to answer their plea: “Remember us.”
Over the years, from time to time, I have met up with Mauthausen survivors. A very few of them knew me personally. These men have come up to me and said, “I remember you. We used to call you ‘the rabbi.’ You knew all the prayers.” One of the goals of the Germans who operated Mauthausen was to work us to death. So we wasted away in the most literal sense. Starved, our bodies wilted until we were human skeletons. We walked around with neither muscle nor fat. Our faces lost their human form and color. As time passed, our minds lost the ability to think clearly and to serve us other than in the capacity of automatic motion. We no longer even had the capacity to shed a tear or worry or rejoice. There was nothing to us. We stopped being human. We were souls trapped behind windows called eyes.
Imagine hauling slabs of granite when you haven’t eaten anything but a bowl of thin soup once a day. Most starving people cannot even walk or speak. But we were pushed to do the unbelievable. The Nazis called us Jews subhuman, but we did what was in no uncertain terms superhuman, functioning against all odds and operating only on instinct. Just another day, hour, or minute until the end. When would the end come? We couldn’t even pray for that moment. Physically and mentally we, as prisoners who never committed a crime, were transformed into something not human. Tens of thousands of people were murdered, in one way or another in Mauthausen, but even those of us who survived lost our souls.