Scheisshaus Luck

by Pierre Berg

  Scheisshaus Luck

  Pierre Berg

  Brian Brock

  “A harrowing story. A worthy supplement to the reports of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel.”

  - Kirkus Reviews

  “This is a fascinating story of survival against the worst of odds.”

  - JT News

  A searing, brutal account of a French teenager’s survival in Auschwitz… and a major addition to Holocaust literature.

  In 1943, 18-year-old Pierre Berg picked the wrong time to visit a friend’s house—at the same time as the Gestapo. He was thrown into the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. But through a mixture of savvy and chance, he managed to survive… and ultimately got out alive. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Berg, “it was all shithouse luck, which is to say—inelegantly—that I kept landing on the right side of the randomness of life.

  “Such begins the first memoir of a French gentile Holocaust survivor published in the U.S. Originally penned shortly after the war when memories were still fresh, Scheisshaus Luck recounts Berg’s constant struggle in the camps, escaping death countless times while enduring inhumane conditions, exhaustive labor, and near starvation. The book takes readers through Berg’s time in Auschwitz, his hair’s breadth avoidance of Allied bombing raids, his harrowing “death march” out of Auschwitz to Dora, a slave labor camp (only to be placed in another forced labor camp manufacturing the Nazis’ V1 & V2 rockets), and his eventual daring escape in the middle of a pitched battle between Nazi and Red Army forces.Utterly frank and tinged with irony, irreverence and gallows humour, Scheisshaus Luck ranks in importance among the work of fellow survivors Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. As we quickly approach the day when there will be no living eyewitnesses to the Nazi’s “Final Solution,” Berg’s memoir stands as a searing reminder of how the Holocaust affected us all.

  Pierre Berg

  with Brian Brock

  SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

  Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora

  To all my comrades who didn’t make it

  “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

  —MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

  FOREWORD

  In 1947, two years after Pierre Berg escaped from a Nazi concentration camp, he began writing down his experiences. His goal was to record his observations of those terrible eighteen months before he forgot them. He had no intention of ever publishing them. None-theless, he gave these recollections a title, Odyssey of a Pajama.

  Pierre wrote his memoir in French, but since he was now living in America, he had it translated by a UCLA grad student. He then allowed a couple of people to read his odyssey, and they convinced him that a magazine or book publisher might be interested in his story. In 1954, after two rejection letters, one from the Saturday Evening Post and the other from Harper’s, Pierre put his concentration camp memoir aside and got on with his new life in Los Angeles.

  More than fifty years later, I was supplementing my income as a struggling writer by working the concession stand at a playhouse in Beverly Hills. Pierre, now retired, was working as an usher. During a Sunday matinee performance, Pierre and I struck up a conversation on the writer’s life. He informed me that he had written something about his time in the camps. A few days later he handed me a 145-page manuscript. As I read Odyssey of a Pajama for the first time, it was obvious that Pierre’s experiences in the camps were unique and compelling. His voice was frank and was tinged with irony, irreverence, and gallows humor. The situations he found himself in were horrifying, heartbreaking, perverse, and oddly enough, sometimes funny. I was fascinated by his tale and by the young man in it. I believed that Pierre’s story would be a major addition to the Holocaust literature.

  We decided to work together to amplify the original manuscript, which we did through both oral and written interviews. One of the problems I found was that many of the events that the young Pierre had written about lacked crucial details that would immerse the reader in that world and in what he had suffered. After my initial interviews, it also became evident that some of the incidents the teenager had endured or witnessed did not appear in the manuscript. It was no surprise to me that the original manuscript was incomplete: It was written as a private journal by a very young man who, in 1947, had no way to judge the significance of what he had just experienced. Also, because his mother was typing the manuscript for him, Pierre had left things out in order to spare her the details of some horrific events he had been involved in.

  As Pierre’s collaborator I felt that I had two major responsibilities. First, I needed to ensure that his personality came across on the page. Second, I wanted to be sure that we expressed as vividly as possible the emotional impact of the daily life-and-death struggle in Auschwitz. This latter goal proved to be the more difficult.

  It is well known that those who have been brutalized and violated block those memories as a survival mechanism. Pierre was no different. He was resistant to talking about the emotions that gripped him during those eighteen months, saying many times that he didn’t feel anything. But the details he related to me, and his gestures and expressions in regard to those events, said otherwise.

  When he was unwilling to delve into the emotions of a specific incident, I would present him with differing emotional points of view, and this would often ignite a dialogue that enabled us to capture his emotional state at that time.

  We had many arguments, especially when I aggressively tried to elicit Pierre’s reactions and emotions. I pushed him relentlessly because I thought it was important that his story be told fully. It is a credit to Pierre’s strength of character that he never wavered in his resolve that this story be told completely—and that he never took a swing at me.

  Concentration camp inmates all wore triangles of varying colors to distinguish the different classes of prisoners. Pierre’s was a red triangle (political prisoner). His story is vital because it is a reminder that it wasn’t just yellow triangles (Jews) who were rounded up and killed by the Nazis. The Jewish people suffered the most, but Gypsies, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and other men, women, and children from every country in Europe were imprisoned and perished alongside them. Scheisshaus Luck will remind everyone that none of us—no matter what race, religion, nationality, or political conviction—are immune from becoming a victim of genocide.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  To be faithful to the spirit of Pierre’s original manuscript, we have purposely steered away from putting the events in a historical context or of adding the elderly Pierre’s thoughts on what he had endured sixty-two years earlier.

  This, then, is the autobiographical account of an eighteen-year-old Häftling (inmate).

  Brian Brock

  PREFACE

  If you’re seeking a Holocaust survivor’s memoir with a profound philosophical or poetic statement on the reasons six million Jews and many millions of other unlucky souls were slaughtered, and why a person like myself survived the Nazi camps, you’ve opened the wrong book. I’d be lying if I said I knew the reason, or if I even believed there is a reason, I’m still alive. As far as I’m concerned it was all shithouse luck, which is to say—inelegantly—that I kept landing on the right side of the randomness of life.

  I can rattle off the reasons for the Holocaust that I’ve read in books and magazines, and they definitely contain some truth, but for me they fall short of fully explaining how a place as inhumane as Auschwitz could exist. There’s nothing I’ve perused or heard spoken by Holocaust experts that explains the sadistic cancer that sprang from the Nazi masterminds, spread so easily through their SS henchmen, poisoned the Kapos (supervisors) and underlings, then killed and maimed untold millions. When
you lived with that cancer day in and day out for eighteen months, no words, no jargon, no hypothesis, no historical context or philosophical noodling or religious rhetoric can adequately explain the glee or stone-cold soullessness in those murderers’ eyes. No philosophical discourse will make sense of the memories of the innocent men I saw hung, beaten to death, shot in the head, or trucked off to Birkenau. Or why the stench of death had to greet us every morning when we woke, befriend us while we slaved for our Nazi masters, then follow us back to camp every night.

  All I can give you, I hope, dear reader, is an understanding of what it was like to be an able-bodied teenager torn from family, friends, and home, tossed into a Nazi death camp, and nearly reduced to what the Nazis considered all of us who were tattooed, Untermensch (subhuman).

  Pierre Berg

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It has been a long odyssey. There were times I wondered if I would live to see my memoir in print. Thankfully, that’s not a worry anymore. Brian and I couldn’t have done it without the guidance and support of countless friends, and our agent, Regina Ryan.

  We’d especially like to thank:

  Michelle Upchurch

  Ed Sweeney

  Siegfried Halbreich

  Sean Mozal

  Marlon West

  Barry Dennen

  Mark Protosevich

  Irene Baran

  Brad Brock

  Joe Kusek

  Sarah Aspen

  And our wonderful editors at AMACOM Books: Bob Nirkind and Mike Sivilli

  PART I

  DRANCY

  CHAPTER 1

  Drancy, January 1944: A door slammed. I turned and found that Stella and I were now all alone. A searchlight’s beam passed by the rain-drenched windows. Stella’s damp, red hair was matted against her forehead and hung in rattails down her neck. Tears had dulled her blue eyes.

  The guards’ shrill whistles and the murmur of fellow prisoners shuffling into formation outside bounced off the whitewashed walls.

  Stella buried her face against my shoulder. Her body shook. I held her closer so she wouldn’t notice my own tremors. I pressed my mouth to her neck and found her racing pulse beating under my lips.

  It was time to go. No sense getting dragged and kicked down two flights of stairs. I gently pried Stella’s arms from around my neck and picked up my blanket roll and burlap bag of clothes.

  Strewn about the floor were vermin-infested mattresses, one of which had been my bed.

  Neither of us spoke as we moved down the empty corridor. One wall was covered with old and newly scrawled farewell messages to loved ones not yet rounded up. I counted my footsteps in a vain attempt not to think about what was coming.

  Going down the stairs, I wanted to comfort Stella, give her hope, but I kept silent. There wasn’t a reassuring word I could squeak out with any conviction.

  We walked out into the rain. Stella squeezed my hand at her waist. Standing before us in the cinder-lined courtyard were our traveling companions, twelve hundred prisoners of the Third Reich.

  Stella’s parents eagerly waved to her from the edge of the throng. Without a word, she released my hand and ran to them. I watched her hug her mother and father and wished I had kissed her. The tears I had held back in her presence now mixed with the cold rain.

  “Hey, Pierre, are you coming or not?”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  My friends were calling. There had been fifty of us, single men and a handful of teenagers like myself, living in that barren second-floor room, and now we would travel together on the train. We had been snatched up from all corners of France. Some of us were members of the Maquis (French Resistance). Others had been shipped in from other camps or prisons. Many had been awakened in the middle of the night, swept away as they were, and then were stunned to find themselves staring at freedom from behind barbed wire in the Paris district of Drancy. The Germans had transformed a half-finished apartment complex into a transit internment camp from where all “undesirables,” mainly Jews, were deported to vari-ous Nazi concentration camps east of the Rhine.

  As I trotted over to my pals, the wind carried snatches of voices singing songs of the maquisards (Resistance fighters). Many more voices joined in the singing of the “Marche de Lorraine,” a hymn of the “Free French,” and “La Marseillaise,” the French national an-them. I stared contemptuously at the SS in their field gray uniforms as they let loose random volleys of submachine gunfire in attempts to intimidate us. The gendarmes (French military police) and gardes-mobiles (French federal police) stood motionless in their warm coats.

  I joined in the singing of our version of “Le Chant des Marais.”

  “Le printemps refleurira, Liberté, Libertećheŕie Je dirai: Tu es à moi.”

  (But one day in our lives, spring flower, freedom, cherished freedom, I will say: You are mine.)

  Others took up the chorus. “Piocher, piocher.” (Swing a pick axe, swing a pick axe.)

  The roar of diesel engines drowned out our voices. Pulling into the courtyard with their headlights barely piercing the morning fog, the Paris buses looked like milky-eyed monsters hungry for new bones to mash. This is finally it, I said to myself.

  Drancy had been the scene of much misery, but it was where I nevertheless had spent some of the happiest moments of my eighteen years. I craned my neck for a glimpse of Stella, but had no luck.

  I looked over at the camp’s shithouse, Le Château, and wondered if a new arrival would find a sliver of good fortune when inheriting my duties as the lord of that rank domain. Behind Le Château was the building where we had been searched the evening of our arrival.

  Stella had a small gold coin, her good luck charm, that she didn’t want to lose, so while we waited our turn to be frisked I hid it in a piece of bread I had saved. She squeezed my hand when I returned the keepsake the next day.

  Across from that building were the rooms where they housed the new arrivals. No light shone in the windows, but I was sure that shadowy figures were pressing their faces to the grimy panes of glass, wondering when their time would come. That had been my thought as I watched a group being herded out my first night. I had hoped with all my heart that I wouldn’t be forced onto one of those buses, but I quickly learned that, from behind barbed wire, hope hardly ever brought more than heartache.

  A loaded bus drove by. Someone wiped their fogged-up window and waved to me.

  “Stella, Stella!” I cried.

  Instinctively I started after her, but a strong hand fell on my shoulder.

  “Don’t, kid. You’ll see your Stella again,” Jonny murmured.

  “You think so?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I turned to see the blue exhaust of Stella’s bus swirling at the gate.

  My group began to board one of the buses. A Paris flic (French slang for a policeman) was seated beside the driver. Two gendarmes, shouldering rifles with fixed bayonets, guarded the rear platform. I sat down next to Jonny, who mopped his bald head with a red bandana. He was a former circus strongman, a Parisian Jew whose imposing build and calm manner had made him a natural leader in Drancy. It was rumored that he was the illegitimate son of a “doughboy” (WW I American soldier).

  Jonny always had a good word to say to me when we passed each other in the courtyard and a joke to tell us all as we settled in for the night. He put his thick arm around my shoulder as I stared out the window.

  “Let’s go!” shouted one of the gendarmes.

  After making a sharp turn, our bus rumbled toward the exit.

  Those still standing in the rain continued to sing.

  “Ô terre, enfin libre, Où nous pourrons revivre, Aimer! Aimer!”

  (Oh earth, finally free, where we can again live and love! Love!) The gate swung open. A curly-haired boy furiously pedaling his bike shot by as our bus pulled onto the street. I had been riding my bike the day I got myself into this predicament.

  CHAPTER 2

  Nice, November 1943: One
morning my friend Claude arrived at my house dirty, bloody, and out of breath. For several years he and I sat next to each other in school. I lost count of how many times we had been reprimanded for playing tic-tac-toe during lectures.

  Now that we were in the second stage of lycee (high school) we didn’t see each other as often, since I had opted for philosophy as my major and Claude had chosen mathematics.

  “Can you hide me?” he asked.

  “Sure. Why?” I asked, disconcerted by his appearance.

  “Two Vichy goons came to our house to arrest me.”

  Two months earlier, September 8, 1943, to be exact, the Nazis occupied southern France after the Italians had pulled out of the war. Emboldened by the influx of SS and Gestapo, the Fascist milice (militia) in our hometown of Nice became more active.

  “Why did they want to arrest you?”

  “They’re rounding up more bodies to finish the boches’ [derogatory slang for Germans] Atlantic wall. Hell, no. I jumped through my rear window right into a bush.”

  I had heard that the traitors were snatching people at random.

  Claude smiled when I glanced down our driveway.

  “Don’t worry. I lost them for good.”

  “Get washed and I’ll patch you up.”

  Claude wasn’t sure why they had chosen him. It could have been because his parents were Italian, or because he was born in the French colony of Indochina. It could be they figured he had a strong back. Claude was a head taller than I was, and very athletic.

  It was no problem letting him hide in our house. My parents were gone and wouldn’t be back for a month or more. Since I was ten, my parents had been in the habit of leaving me alone when my mother accompanied my father on his business trips to Paris, Geneva, or Berlin. There was always a maid, but since their concern was keeping the house tidy, and not my comings and goings, I was more or less left to my own devices.